


goodbye to all my darkness, there's nothing here but light

by sublime_jumbles



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Belly Kink, Belly Rubs, Canon Bisexual Character, Caretaking, Chubby Ethan, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Ethan and Vanessa are both bi and that is very important to me, F/M, Feeding, Feeding Kink, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hand Feeding, Hiccups, Kink Negotiation, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Literal Sleeping Together, Non-Sexual Bondage, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Kink, Non-Sexual Submission, Overeating, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Life Partners, Platonic Soulmates, Praise Kink, Psychic Abilities, Queerplatonic Relationships, Separation Anxiety, Sharing a Bed, Stuffing, Tarot, Weight Gain, Werewolves, everything is basically the same until 2x09 and then it diverges, handwavey werewolf mechanics, self-care, when i say light y'all i MEAN light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:28:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 50,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25572871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles
Summary: “Here’s what I think,” he counters, bracing his hands on the counter’s edge. “You need a project. A hobby. And you’re latching onto this because it’s mysterious. It’s occult. But it is just that, Vanessa: miserable. I know. I’ve lived with it for years. There’s nothing to dig up. It’s a curse, plain and simple.”She hardens her gaze. “I think I can help you.”“And I’m telling you, I can’t be helped.”“They said the same about me,” she says, folding her arms across her chest, airtight. “And they were wrong.”or: Ethan learns to live with his lycanthropy, Vanessa struggles to find her purpose as a witch, and they both! learn! to be!! loved!!!
Relationships: Ethan Chandler & Vanessa Ives, Ethan Chandler/Vanessa Ives
Comments: 25
Kudos: 66





	1. the fool

**Author's Note:**

> WOOHOO FUCKIN FINALLY!!!!! this took so long and was often SO hard that i had serious doubts about finishing it. i've done very little else for the past ~2 months and it's so so exciting to finally be able to share this giant, wild project with you. i have hated it and loved it and hope i have made it right, etc.
> 
> this takes place after an alternate 2x10 where ethan stays with vanessa. also sembene is alive because i said so
> 
> ***
> 
> enormous, endless thanks to wy for being my fearless alpha reader, editor extraordinaire, resident tarot expert, synonym superhero, thematic-thread champion, kink compatriot, and all-around cheerleader, and for pointing out all the times i somehow mixed up "his" and "her" despite writing an m/f pairing <3 i love u, thank you for putting up with me for this many words!
> 
> title from "farewell wanderlust" by the amazing devil. because i'm me, i've also included a song for each chapter that i think goes well with it! a couple of chapters have songs in the end notes as well if they go between chapters. you can listen to the whole playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/617AnpOgF33QvtPx6QrrfD?si=VLadeglqRWGjUMN3lkhRQw)!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "love run (intro)," the amazing devil

Vanessa is conducting an experiment. She sips her coffee in the parlor’s soft afternoon light, turns a page of her novel, and then gets up to refill her cup from the percolator between her seat and Ethan’s. The instant she rises, Ethan presses his own novel to his lap, his eyes on her. She catches his eye, smiles, sits back down.

She picks up her book again, but doesn’t read. Instead, she watches Ethan over the line of the cover as he returns to his own novel on the chaise a few feet away. She waits a few minutes, long enough for him to get back into the story, then closes her book and walks to the kitchen. She puts a few biscuits on a plate and nods as the telltale thump of Ethan’s boots moves down the hallway. Just as she expected.

She repeats the experiment a few more times within the hour, to prove her theory. Each time, she gets up, goes to the kitchen, performs some menial task — another pot of coffee, a glass of water, something to eat. And each time, Ethan follows, whether her errands are fifteen minutes apart, or three.

“All right,” she says finally, turning against the counter to face him. “What’s this about?”

Ethan’s brows come together. “What’s what, now?”

“All this — following me,” she says, gesturing. “You keep trailing me. Why?”

His eyes dart to hers, then down to his boots. “Didn’t mean to,” he says, one hand scrubbing at the scruff of his neck. “Didn’t notice.”

She reaches for his hips, and he takes a step closer. “I’ve come to the kitchen four times in the last hour, and you’ve followed me every time.”

“Just wanna be close to you,” he says, drawing closer, and she holds him, braces one arm around his waist and another at his cheek. “Nothin’ more.”

His voice is casual, and she knows, truly, that he probably believes that. This probably feels very natural to him. It certainly _is_ natural, given all of her recent reading on wolves. 

“Would you like my theory?” she asks, and he grins, hoisting himself onto the counter behind him. Sembene would never allow it, but she rather likes the boyish eagerness of it. 

“The floor is yours, Professor Ives.”

She clasps her hands and paces in front of him. “There’s a full moon on Friday,” she begins, and Ethan’s face collapses a little, but she presses on. 

The full moon is still several days away, but over the course of the past month, she’s been gathering evidence, noting tics and habits, trying to make sense of the complex set of neuroses, preparative strategies, and coping mechanisms that surrounds Ethan’s condition. Vanessa has never paid much attention to the lunar calendar; dark forces use the night with or without illumination. But with Sir Malcolm and Sembene away, and nothing left to threaten her, the cycles of the moon have become the only thing governing her days. The cycles of the moon, that is, and Ethan’s bizarre machinations. She’s learned that his shifting spans three nights each month, leaving him haggard and exhausted, and she wonders if there are factors that could be manipulated to ease his suffering, or if it’s simply a consequence of his condition, as it was a consequence of being a medium for her for so long.

But not so for her, anymore. The moment she destroyed her likeness in the Poole mansion, the Verbis Diablo pouring from her lips like the scorpions streaming from the crushed-in face of the doll, she felt something in her give way. The darkness that had made a home in her core, the shadows threaded through her every vein — it all began to recede, and the louder she shouted — the harder she thrust the words from her, the harder she crushed the simulacrum with the strong, pale spider of her hand — the further she drove it back, until she was left, breathless and trembling, wrung-out, and — _free_. 

If peace is possible for her, she has decided, it must be so for Ethan, too. 

“I’ve been thinking,” she continues, pacing away. “And I _know_ that you would prefer we chained you in the cellar and moved along, but I think we could find an alternative, if we began paying attention.”

“Paying attention to what?” Ethan asks warily, folding his hands in his lap. He fidgets when he’s anxious, but even as he tries to hide it, she can see it in the way his eyes move anywhere but hers, in the startled pull of his shoulders. 

“Your signs, your symptoms,” she says, waving a hand. “Are there things we can ease?”

Ethan ducks his head. “I don’t think all that is necessary.”

Vanessa feels her brow furrow. “Of course it’s necessary. The whole company of you never gave up on me; I think it’s appropriate that I return the favor.”

He makes a low, tense sound. “It’s not worth trying.”

“Would you rather be miserable?” she asks, pausing in front of him. His brown eyes meet hers, tired and troubled.

“Here’s what I think,” he counters, bracing his hands on the counter’s edge. “You need a project. A hobby. And you’re latching onto this because it’s mysterious. It’s occult. But it is just that, Vanessa: _miserable_. I know. I’ve lived with it for years. There’s nothing to dig up. It’s a curse, plain and simple.”

She hardens her gaze. “I think I can help you.”

“And I’m telling you, I can’t be helped.”

“They said the same about me,” she says, folding her arms across her chest, airtight. “And they were wrong.”

For a moment they regard each other stonily. His face is set, his jaw tight, and _ooh_ Vanessa could spit, he looks so stubborn. She’s been burying herself in research, in studies of wolf behavior and emotional trauma. Ethan has big feelings, she knows that; he has a heart as big as she imagines the American West. But even land so endless, so wild, needs to be tilled, turned over, tended, in order to grow. If she can just get Ethan to _talk_ about some of this, to stop holding it so close over the fire of his heart, maybe he would actually feel _better_.

She holds his gaze. Vanessa Ives is nothing if not more stubborn than the Devil.

“So tell me why I’m following you around,” Ethan says finally, and she feels some of the tension leave her brow.

“Ah,” she says, stepping closer. She tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, slides her hand down to cup the side of his face. Ethan’s eyes flutter closed. “I believe you have a touch of separation anxiety,” she says softly. “It’s very common in dogs.”

Ethan’s mouth crimps, halfway to laughter. “What are you trying to tell me, Miss Ives?”

Ethan doesn’t go in for pet names once he knows someone, and even if he did, Vanessa thinks she wouldn’t like it. _Honey, sweetheart, darling_ — they itch like a tight lace collar, too constricting. But hearing her title in Ethan’s low, slanting drawl undoes something deep in her chest, somehow more personal than hearing him pronounce her given name.

“That we can understand this,” she coaxes. She thumbs at his cheek, and he makes a deep, soft sound that travels through her from where their skin touches. “It doesn’t have to be this thing that we keep in the dark. When the full moon comes, you want to be close to me. You want your pack. It’s natural. And — _oh_ , of _course_ , half of your pack is away, of course you’re anxious.”

Ethan lifts his head incrementally. “You think _that’s_ why I don’t feel right? Because I’m a _pack animal_?”

“Why not?” asks Vanessa, willing him to engage. “It’s very normal for wolves to experience distress when their pack is apart. Why not you, too? This is what I mean, Ethan. If you lean _into_ these feelings, rather than pushing them away, perhaps you’ll lessen the anxiety around them. Don’t you _want_ to understand this?”

She can hear her voice rising, her hands resisting the temptation to tighten around his face, to shake him until he understands. Vanessa has spent so much of her life _unable_ to comprehend her own demons, pathologized by every doctor who thought he could cut or shock or bleed it out of her, that she can’t imagine knowing her condition exactly and not learning as much as she can. She can’t imagine thinking that not understanding would make her any better off. _I know what I am_ , she told the Devil, and it set her free. 

“You may not be able to break your curse,” she says carefully, grazing the tips of her fingers through the soft hair at the nape of his neck. “But I think it might be worth a try to tame it.”

Ethan bows his head in her hands. She can feel his pulse under his skin, elevated, strong, and she presses a kiss to the part in his hair as he considers. 

“We can try,” he says finally. “But I wouldn’t get too excited.”

She laughs, musses his hair. “Oh, Mr. Chandler,” she says fondly. “You’re in the wrong place if you don’t want a bit of excitement.”


	2. the magician

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "if you could break that chain," the show ponies

Ethan wakes when Vanessa throws an elbow into his ribs as she turns over. He starts, expecting danger, nightmare, but Vanessa sleeps on. He smiles, trails two fingers through the dark stream of her hair, down the birdlike angle of her shoulder. She stirs but doesn’t wake, and for a moment he just watches the easy, even rise and fall of her chest. 

It’s been a long month since they first shared a bed, both of them drained dry by what Vanessa rather distantly refers to as _the debacle_ at the Poole mansion. At first, he hadn’t thought much of it: friends comforting each other, safer together than alone. But they’ve shared every night in the month since, and he thinks it’s less about safety now and more that they simply enjoy each other’s company, the comfort of sleeping in someone else’s embrace. He wonders in the back of his mind if it threatens Vanessa’s soul somehow, to share a bed with a man she isn’t married to, but she willingly tucks herself into his arms as often as he tucks himself into hers, and she hasn’t said a word about bringing God into it. They’re chaste as can be, anyhow. He’s touched Vanessa more in the past month than he ever has — he’s woken up to find himself draped over her, or she’s held his head and rubbed his back as he wept from a nightmare, or he’s washed her hair when she’s too weary or wrung-out to do it herself — but the cosmic string that connects them is without that animal yank of desire. It calms something in him just to have her near, and the ease with which she tucks herself against him half-asleep in the night makes him think that it calms her, too. 

Now, he squints at the clock across the room: just past four. He settles onto his back beside her, rolling her words from earlier through his head. He doesn’t know anyone else with his affliction, doesn’t have anyone he can ask for guidance. He’s never thought about trying to live _with_ it, instead of despite it. Just weeks ago, he was ready to turn himself in to Scotland Yard, resign himself to certain death. But now that the inspectors think he’s somewhere on a ship bound for South America, things look a bit less bleak, and Vanessa — well, Vanessa clearly thinks they look a _lot_ less bleak.

The moon is bright tonight, and he cringes out of habit from the light it spills across the bed. He’s been too anxious over the course of the past month to focus on his symptoms, acutely aware of how alone he is with her now that Sir Malcom and Sembene are away. Acutely aware of how, should something go wrong, she has no line of defense against the beast he becomes. 

His memories of the Poole mansion after his transformation are cloudy at best, fragments and shards that don’t quite come together. He remembers blood. He remembers panic, rage, hunger. He remembers Vanessa, so close that he could feel the heat coming off her. The fear that he would harm her never left him, even after he turned tail and ran. It runs under his skin every moment she’s close, the possibility for ruin, for ravening. How he can let himself touch her when that fear boils in him full-force, he can’t say. He’s always had a knack for running headfirst into things that should kill him.

But Vanessa. He rests a hand on his stomach and tips his head toward her. Ethan has known love, however briefly, and he’s known desire, enough to know that his feelings for Vanessa don’t fit neatly in either of those boxes. Oh, he loves her — Christ, does he love her, like a dam broken open, rushing and wild. But it’s different from how he felt about Brona, different even from the momentary spark that leapt between his lips and Hecate’s. He wonders sometimes if it’s — well, if it’s a pack animal thing, like Vanessa theorized last night. If that’s how he explains the unnameable closeness he feels to her: like the deepest friendship imaginable, inextricably affectionate but pulling up short of desire. He’s never said anything to her, worrying that trying to name it will shatter it somehow: this still feels desperately like more than he deserves. 

And she thinks he can be saved. He heaves a sigh, checks that it hasn’t woken her. His transformations are so bundled in shame that even the thought of finding a more bearable way to live feels obscene. How dare he, with so many sins at his back? How dare he find comfort, contentment even, after so many transgressions?

Vanessa makes an unbearably soft sound in her sleep, so gentle he has to close his eyes. She walked into Hell, he thinks. She has seen the worst of herself, the worst of him, and when she walked back into the daylight, she chose him anyway. 

It makes him burn, how badly he wants to believe that that must be worth something.

When he wakes up again, she’s gone, and although he wouldn’t mind sleeping in, the bed feels lonely and overlarge without her, so he hauls himself up, tugs on a sweater. Maybe Vanessa is onto something about separation anxiety, he thinks wryly. Ethan is good at belonging, at finding groups to slip into, and without even noticing, he’d begun considering his company at Grandage Place a sort of family. Now, with half of that company out at sea, his world feels lopsided, a mismatched set of scales. He allows himself that much: he misses his people, and perhaps it _is_ taking a toll on him.

He checks her room first, where he sometimes finds her doing her hair or writing letters at her desk, or sometimes just keeping up the room, swiping at the windows and mantle with a feather duster. But today, it’s empty, so he ventures downstairs, and smiles when the scent of percolating coffee hits him on the stairs. 

Vanessa is poring over the morning paper at the kitchen table, a slim slice of cake on a plate before her. What a thing, he thinks, to watch her wake up to herself now, to see her learn herself without that demonic shroud around her. Her cheeks are pinker, she’s less splintered, and her smiles no longer seem to be drawn from deep within her, as if from a well it took enormous strength for her to plumb.

“Morning,” he says, resting his hands on her shoulders briefly as he presses a kiss to the crown of her head. “Sleep all right?”

She tips her head back and smiles at him. “Very well, thank you. Did you?”

He nods, and she pushes the platter of cake toward him. “You ought to eat more,” he teases her, cutting a slice for himself that’s twice the size of hers and taking the seat across from her. 

She tilts her head at him over the paper, her eyes playful. “I had to leave enough for you, didn’t I?” she says, and he laughs, reaching for the coffee. He catches her eye again and raises his chin, and she nods, and he scoops up her cup to top it off. 

He has two days until the full moon, which means that soon, his appetite will begin to crack him open like dry desert land. He’s bracing. Today is probably the last day he can eat as normal, and then he’ll begin his old habit of restriction. It was easier when he was drinking more, he thinks darkly, taking a seat across from Vanessa. Hunger didn’t seem as sharp with a few whiskeys in him. He wouldn’t trade his life here for slugging cheap alcohol on the seam of society, but it requires significantly more workarounds to exist as a monster when you’re a functioning, civilized individual than when you’re a footloose theatrical type.

He eats his slice of cake and then eats another, trying to savor the feeling of being satisfied while it lasts. He doesn’t intend to let himself out of Grandage Place when he shifts, so there’ll be no livestock or wild animals to hunt to sate himself. Instead, he’s prepared to fall back on another method, left over from his days in the cavalry and on the run. It will not be pleasant. But it won’t add another sin to the litany he’s already committed, either.

“I’ve been thinking,” says Vanessa, sipping her coffee. “Have you tried avoiding moonlight? Is it possible for you to put off the change? If you’re not aware of the exact mechanics of your condition, perhaps we could study it more —?”

Her voice is still morning-low, jagged with sleep, and its sweetness dulls the sharpness the question raises in him. “Tried it a few times back in America,” he says gruffly, busying his hands adding milk to his coffee so she won’t see them start to shake. “Makes you sick as hell. Headache, nausea, paranoia — the worst you’ve ever felt.”

Vanessa’s expression hardens. “Ethan.”

“It’s no use trying to avoid it,” he says. “I told you, it’s a curse. It finds its way into you no matter how hard you try. If you don’t let it take you, it makes you so sick that giving in to the beast seems _preferable_.”

He waits for Vanessa’s rebuttal, but she’s silent, studying him across the table. “There’s no getting away from it,” he says, when he can’t take her silence a moment more, and it isn’t until she remains quiet that he realizes he was hoping she would tell him otherwise, smother him with her confidence that he could be saved.

There’s some part of him, buried so deep he almost can’t hear it calling, that hopes against hope that it’s possible. Vanessa pulled herself from the pits of Hell on the slim line of faith that she could be more than what the Devil made of her, and he’s still chained in irons he donned himself, too tightly bound by his own fierce conviction that he’s beyond saving to see any farther than the next circle. 

But he can’t stop wondering: what if he _isn’t_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "1,000 graves," ruston kelly


	3. the high priestess

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "small hands," radical face
> 
> cw: this chapter includes one character using food restriction to punish himself. this is not framed positively at all. there is also a brief mention of marijuana usage.

Vanessa wakes early on Friday morning to the muffled sound of Ethan crying. Or perhaps she feels it more than she hears it — Ethan isn’t a gentle crier. His sobs shake his whole body, loud and gasping, but he has his face buried in his pillow, curled as small as he can make himself so he won’t wake her.

She creeps closer to him. “Ethan,” she says softly, and he bunches himself tighter, but he lifts his head to meet her eyes. His are red and puffy, his mouth crumpled, and she gathers his big body into her arms, stroking his hair with one hand and rubbing his shoulders with the other. He snuffles pitifully as he tries to get his breathing under control, and she whispers gentle, soothing nothings to him until he starts to quiet.

“Nightmare?” she asks softly, and he nods against her, shuddering. 

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He shakes his head. “Just wolf stuff,” he mumbles into her collarbone, and she  _ hmm _ s in reply, working her fingers through his hair. She’s never known a man who cries so easily as Ethan, and as much as she wishes she could ease his suffering, there’s something refreshingly vulnerable about it. Vanessa is private with her own emotions, finding she retains more power in being even and collected, but sometimes she admires the way that Ethan lets his spill over, lets her see him in all manner of disarray.

She holds him until he’s just small, whimpering sounds and shaky, uneven breaths, and even though she tends to get restless if she lies in bed too long, she knows that being alone will just make him feel worse with his transformation approaching. So she stays with him, one hand laced through his, the other petting at him gently, until he starts to stir a little more. 

He’s subdued all day, and she watches him closely. He slinks behind her when she goes about the house, crowds close to her on the sofa, hangs morosely at the windows. Although he sits near enough to her that she can hear — even feel — the growl of his stomach, he picks at his food all day, until finally Vanessa, exasperated, turns and lays a hand across the buttons on his vest.

“Why don’t you eat something? Start supper, even, it’s late enough.”

Ethan shifts in his seat. “It’s easier if I don’t,” he says after a long moment, bringing his glass of whiskey to his lips. 

She fixes him with a look. “What do you mean, it’s easier?”

He hangs his head, his hair sweeping out from behind his ears. “Easier for me. When I hu — what I do, when I shift. It’s easier for me if I can justify that I was starving.”

“But you’re not going out,” says Vanessa, puzzled. “We’ll put you in the cellar, you don’t need to worry. You certainly don’t need to  _ starve _ .”

Ethan pulls himself into the corner of the sofa, his big frame folding as he tucks his shoulders in, wrings his hands in his lap. “The less strength I have, the less damage I’ll do.”

“You’ve barely eaten all day,” she says, hearing the urgency in her voice tick up. “You can’t let yourself shift on so little, you’ll collapse.”

Ethan is silent, his eyes trained on his hands where they’re fiddling in his lap, and his intention rolls over Vanessa like a shroud.

“No,” she says loudly. “ _ No _ , you will not. You’ll be perfectly safe in the basement. The chains will hold, you know that. I won’t let you starve yourself out of unnecessary guilt.”

Ethan raises his head some, but his eyes are still cloudy with shame. His stomach growls again.

“If I have to eat, you have to eat,” she says firmly. She’s sick thinking of him doing this once a month, trying to force himself into unconsciousness to minimize his damage. “Come on, I’ll fix you something.”

Cooking is not a skill she’s ever taken to, but she can boil an egg, make a decent soup. She’s fairly sure of her ability to put something in the oven and wait for it to be done. She will make it work, she decides, tugging Ethan off the sofa and down the hall. His hands are hot and damp, his pulse fast and anxious, and when he settles at the kitchen table, he can’t keep still. His fingers drum at the tabletop, one of his knees jiggling brittly. Her heart twists in her chest. 

She darts back to the living room and retrieves one of her cannabis cigarettes. She uses them to stimulate her own appetite when she has a hard time with food, though it hasn’t been nearly so difficult to make herself eat since she cast out her demons. “This might help,” she says, offering it to Ethan, and he takes it gratefully, closing his eyes as he lights up.

She pokes through their stock as Ethan smokes. There’s meat in the icebox, and vegetables that she’s reasonably sure she can turn edible if Ethan advises over her shoulder, where she’s sure he’ll be hovering anyway. As she pulls things out and studies them, he sidles up beside her, the pungent, earthy smell of smoke clinging to him. Vanessa doesn’t have an animal’s intuition, but even her own is enough that she can sense the fear coursing through him.

“It’s all right,” she murmurs, reaching for his waist. “I’ll keep you safe.”

He scoffs. “It’s not my safety I’m worried about,” he says, but as she gets to work slicing pork and vegetables and sussing out the basics of the stove, she notices the subtle shift in his breathing as the drug begins to ease his anxiety. 

He moves around the kitchen with her, subdued but helpful, murmuring directions in his low, leaning drawl:  _ Turn the gas down a little. More spice than that, don’t be shy.  _ His chest presses against her shoulders, his hands light on her waist, and he rests his chin on top of her head for just a moment. Then: “Whoa, there, you need to turn that or it’s gonna burn.”

She hisses and flips the chop in the pan, drawing back toward Ethan when it spits hot grease toward her. He laughs — the meat is nearly black on one side — and hooks his arm around her waist again. “Who’d have thought this would be your undoing?” he asks, and she fixes him with a hard stare that she can’t keep herself from laughing through. 

She  _ loves  _ Ethan, in a way she hasn’t loved since Mina: thoroughly, completely, from every angle, like sun streaming through the stained glass of her heart. But just as her love for Mina fell into that no-man’s-land between friendship and romance, so too do her feelings for Ethan. She cares for him deeply, and although she likes some of the trappings of romantic involvement, her history with the Devil is such that most elements of it are just — unbearable. If this were a Brontë novel, Ethan’s love would heal her gun-shy perspective on romance, spackle over her trauma with love words and courtship rituals. But Vanessa isn’t sure that she  _ wants  _ that. What she  _ wants _ , what keeps her restless in the dark beside Ethan’s soft, snoring shape, is for him to love her without all of that. She wants him to understand that she needs to be left alone sometimes, that weeks might pass without her desiring any physical affection at all, that sometimes what she really wants is a  _ friend  _ she chastely shares a bed with, not a  _ betrothed _ . 

When the Devil showed her what she could have, it had only taken her a moment to understand why it could not be so. The future he’d manufactured for her was so —  _ close _ , not to what she wanted but  _ too close _ , no room to breathe, so idyllic it edged into the uncanny. Lovely, but  _ wrong  _ somehow, in its assumptions of what she would want. That she would be swayed by the promise of sex, of marriage, of children? If he had simply shown her companionship, an unconditional hand to hold in the darkness — perhaps then it would have been harder to choose.

Now, one of Ethan’s hands lingers at her waist. The other plays with the ends of her hair. When she woke from a nightmare last week, he didn’t kiss her or hold her. He sat beside her on the floor until she reached for his hand, and he brushed and braided her hair until she felt safe enough to sleep. The Devil’s vision  _ smothered  _ — Ethan lets her breathe.

He’s quiet as she finishes preparing the meal and sets water to boil for tea. He folds himself back into his seat at the table, the spent cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. When she sets his plate down in front of him, he picks up his fork, and her heart leaps to the back of her throat, hopeful. But when he prods at the pork and parsnips with bacon, it’s halfhearted, and she sits across the table from him, her hands tight with worry.

She knows Ethan can eat. She’s caught him in the kitchen with Sembene after meals, halfway through a thick slab of cake or a mess of trifle despite a hearty supper. She’s woken to a cool bed in the night and wandered downstairs to find him scarfing down bread and milk with only  _ I just wanted something  _ as an explanation. It kills her to see his shoulders folded in, staring down his full plate like it’s an enemy. She wonders if this is how she’s looked to the company of them when she’s been unable to eat — the same stiff, slanting posture, tight jaw, furrowed brow.

His stomach growls again, and they exchange a look: Vanessa’s stubborn, Ethan’s pained. 

“I grew up in a very wealthy home,” she tries with a thin smile. “Your indulgence won’t offend me, Mr. Chandler.”

“It’s not vanity,” Ethan says stiffly, and she understands. She’s spent enough evenings in the same position, unable to indulge even a few bites despite Sir Malcolm and Sembene’s urgings. 

“I’ll feed it to you, if it’s easier,” she says, half-teasing, and Ethan gives her the ghost of a smile, shakes his head.

“Not necessary, Miss Ives,” he says, but he takes a bite. The tension doesn’t leave his face, but he takes another bite after the first, which she decides is auspicious. 

“Will you be hungry in the morning?” she asks, taking a bite from her own plate. It’s perhaps not the  _ best  _ meal she’s had — the pork is tough and the parsnips are a bit soft, as she forgot to tend to them while she was busy burning the meat — but it should be enough to sustain Ethan through his transformation, if he’ll just humor her and eat it. 

He doesn’t respond, and she presses, “I expect it must be exhausting?”

He nods, pushing at the meat on his plate with the tip of his fork. “It is,” he says, and his voice takes on the vicious gruffness he uses when he can’t forgive himself for what he’s saying. “But normally, I hunt.”

Like it was spoken into her ear, she remembers him hacking at the tree in front of the cottage on Ballentree Moor:  _ Not hungry _ , he had grunted when she’d offered him breakfast, and she thinks of all the livestock loose on the moors. She’d thought him short then, but it makes sense now. He must have glutted himself, she thinks, and it stirs something in her that she isn’t sure how to understand.

“So you  _ will  _ be hungry in the morning,” she says instead of examining it, mentally cataloguing the kitchen’s stock. She can manage breakfast, and her body never lets her sleep in, anyway. 

Ethan exhales, as if he’s been waiting for her to pass judgment. “I’d assume yes,” he says, and digs into his meal with a little more vigor. 

She eats her own parsnips and bacon, and when Ethan swallows the last of his pork, she wordlessly offers him her own chop. He nods, and she slides it onto his plate, grateful both for his concession to his appetite and an excuse not to finish it herself. If he’s used to hunting livestock to sate himself, a bit of burnt pork probably won’t faze him. 

She watches as he finishes her serving and leans back, stretching his arms out behind him. “Is there anything else?” he asks after a moment, his voice hoarse, hesitant.

Joy and relief flood her chest, a potion so potent it could levitate her off the floor. “There’s some cake left,” she says, nodding toward the larder. “Please, help yourself.”

Ethan unfolds himself, grazes two fingers over Vanessa’s shoulder, as he passes. He refills her cup of tea and then his, and sits down to make quick work of the cake. His posture is less tense than it has been all day, and when Vanessa catches his eye, he gives her a small, languid smile.

“Feel better?” she asks, and he nods, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin. 

“Might sleep through that full moon after all.” He pats his stomach, and Vanessa grips her teacup more tightly. “You cook an interesting meal, Miss Ives.”

“But an effective one,” she counters, and he smiles wide, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

“You’ll get that pork chop next time, I know it.”

She laughs. “This seems the natural product of spending my childhood practicing taxidermy rather than learning to cook.”

He shakes his head, still smiling, and for an instant the contentment between them is so palpable she wants to drop the moment in amber, wear it around her neck so it stays close to her heart. 

“Will you stay with me tonight?” he asks, pushing his plate away, and she nods, hope pricking up its ears in her chest. She spent the remainder of last month’s full moon in the cellar, her chair set at a safe distance across the room. He put up a fuss each night —  _ it’s too dangerous, I’ll never forgive myself if I hurt you, you don’t know the risks  _ — and each night, Vanessa traipsed downstairs, book in hand, and stubbornly bore witness to make sure he didn’t endanger himself doing anything foolish. That he would  _ ask  _ her to stay is promising, she decides. For a pack animal, he certainly is determined to endure his suffering alone.

“Of course,” she says, squeezing his hand. “I’d like to see what difference a good meal makes for your transformation.”

Ethan scoffs. “A well-fed monster’s still a monster.”

“Or perhaps,” says Vanessa, gazing at him over her teacup, “a monster is simply a wolf that needs feeding.”

Ethan doesn’t look convinced, but he lets her take his hand when she slides hers across the table. 

Later, she shepherds him to the cellar, and he stands in front of her obediently as she fastens the cuffs around his wrists, the moonlight through the cellar window casting the room in ghostly grays and whites. She takes in the size of his hands compared to hers, their breadth, their squareness. It sends a little thrill through her, that Ethan is so much larger than she is, and yet he yields to her, uses that size to protect rather than challenge or intimidate. 

His breathing picks up as she checks the irons to make sure they’re securely locked, and she cups his jaw in one hand, thumbing at the soft skin of his cheek. She can’t blame him for being anxious when he treats himself like a criminal this way, relegating himself to chains and stone as if it’s the most he deserves. Even a full stomach won’t help him with that, she thinks wryly, and does her best to be gentle. His eyes are quick and wild with panic, and he keeps closing them as if he can blink away the change, rolling his lips together and shifting his weight. 

“It’s all right,” she says softly. “You’re safe. I’ll keep you safe.”

Ethan’s chest is kicking in and out, and she splays a hand over the rough fabric of his undershirt, over his heart. “Are you afraid?” he whispers, and she shakes her head.

“Not of you.”

He closes his eyes again, shuddering, then jerks his chin up at her.

“Go — sit,” he says hoarsely, nodding at the chair across the room. “Please. Promise me you’ll leave at the first sign of danger.”

She holds him by his cuffed wrists and stands on her toes to press a soft kiss to his forehead. “I promise,” she says, and she crosses the room to wait.


	4. the empress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "heavy in your arms," florence + the machine (yes pun intended)

Ethan is used to waking up after a full moon with no idea where he is, the shame creeping in fast and hot and human when he registers the blood smeared across his skin, lodged beneath his fingernails. He’s used to the shaky sickness of having to look at what he’s done, trying to slot it into the blank spot in his memory.

But this morning, he wakes in the cellar of Grandage Place without any trace of blood on him, his shame at arm’s length. The tiny window above him sheds warm light like penance. He pushes himself up on one elbow. He’s draped in a throw blanket he recognizes from the parlor, and after a moment of shifting against the cold stone, he realizes it’s because he’s naked. His clothes are neatly folded into a crisp pile on the floor a meter or so away, and he stares at them, puzzled. He’s _always_ woken up fully dressed. 

Vanessa is nowhere to be found, but her chair and paperback are still here, as if to reassure him that she didn’t abandon him in the night. But he knows that, because … he … remembers.

It’s not as cohesive as a typical memory, but neither is it the gauzy, taunting gap he usually wakes up with. He remembers Vanessa sitting on the hard stone floor, her low, firm voice reading aloud. He remembers fear, but not bloodlust; restlessness, but not ravening. 

His memory obscures the part where he — or _she_ ? It _can’t_ have been Vanessa — removed his clothes. He growls deep in the back of his throat, realizing that the chains around his wrists are gone too. Could Vanessa have removed them when he shifted back —? His empty stomach churns, his breathing going shallow with panic. 

But the smells of breakfast are wafting down from upstairs, and he goes lightheaded from the combined effects of his hunger and the realization that if Vanessa is making breakfast, she must be alive and unharmed. So few are the times he’s shifted without glutting himself during the night that now, his hunger unnerves him with its intensity, and he puts a hand to his stomach as he frees himself from the blanket, willing himself to retain his control.

That morning on the moors, he’d opened his eyes to crisp gray winter grass and half as many sheep as there had been the night before. When he’d tried to move, every joint in his body had protested, stiff and freezing, and his stomach had turned over, so full of poached livestock that it hurt to sit up. He’d considered making himself sick, but the longer he lay beneath the cold highland sky, the more a perverse sense of satisfaction had moved over him: it was so novel not to be starving. The few days prior had been a study in extremes — the gentle coziness of sharing a cannabis cigarette with Vanessa, and the wild, scraping fear that she would find out what he was, that he would lose control. But this — this was simple, a lull in the unsteady lurch between hypervigilance and domesticity. For the first time in weeks, there wasn’t a space in him that was howling to be filled, or soothed, or sated, and it unnerved him, how pleasant it felt even in its discomfort.

He’s afraid that if he lets himself eat like that again, he won’t be able to ignore how good it felt to be _full_. 

His stomach makes a mighty, wolfish sound, and he levers himself off the floor, the muscles in his back complaining, and tugs his clothes back on. He takes the stairs two at a time, pausing at the top when his head begins to spin as he steps into the heat of the kitchen. 

Vanessa turns in his direction as he steadies himself against the wall, her smile radiant in the late morning light. “You’re awake!” she says, delighted. She’s clutching a large knife, and the picture of her, backlit with sun, her dark dressing gown clouding around her, makes him weak with relief. He could kiss her, if he weren’t acutely aware of how much she does not care to be kissed. He smiles even as he’s blinking black spots from his eyes. “How do you feel?”

“All right,” he says, taking his weight off the wall experimentally. “Starving. Little bit shaky.”

“Sick?” she asks, her mouth tightening slightly in apprehension, and he shakes his head.

“No, ma’am.”

Vanessa _beams_. “Excellent,” she says over the sizzling of the pan she’s poking at on the stove. “I have some very interesting news for you about last night, but — come here, sit down. I thought you might be hungry.”

He follows her gaze to the kitchen table, which holds a tureen of scrambled eggs, a platter of ham and bacon, and an enormous dish of potatoes. He can smell bread toasting, and whatever Vanessa is close to burning — sausage, maybe. His hollowed-out stomach makes a pitiful sound, and he swallows once, then again, as his mouth begins to water. 

When he looks back at Vanessa, she looks uncharacteristically uncertain, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. “Did I do too much?” she asks softly. “I couldn’t bear to think of you starving again after last night.”

He shakes his head and moves to hug her, her face fitting perfectly against his shoulder. She smells sharp and sweet, like castile soap and the oil she combs through her hair, and he kisses the top of her head gently. 

“Not too much,” he says, although it’s enough to feed the entire company of them, with some left over. “Thank you, Miss Ives. Did you eat something?”

She nods, stepping back from him. “I had tea and cake when I came up from the cellar. I’ll have something with you as well.”

He takes a seat at the table. Vanessa lays a tray of toast and sausages between them and sits cater-corner to him, her teacup clasped between her hands. He’s so hungry that as he loads his plate, his hands tremble with the effort it takes not to pull the serving dishes toward him and begin shoveling down food directly from them. He takes a long, shuddering breath. _You are not an animal_ , he reminds himself. _You are_ not _an animal_.

But his appetite disagrees. The eggs are slightly underdone, the potatoes and sausage slightly burnt, but as soon as he’s swallowed his first mouthful, he can’t take the next fast enough. He gulps down bite after bite, so quickly he can barely taste it, desperate to fill the pit of his stomach. He eats and eats, refilling his plate before it can empty. Only when he finally pauses to catch his breath does he remember that Vanessa is watching him.

His face heats as he brings his napkin to his mouth and muffles a belch into the cloth. “Miss Ives,” he mumbles, keeping his eyes on his plate. “Excuse my manners. I’m not — I’m not used to this.”

“Not to worry,” says Vanessa evenly, though as she sips her tea Ethan could swear that there’s something in her eyes that’s slightly animal. “You’ve had quite a long night. Would you like to hear about it? Or” — she pauses, tilts her head, inquisitive — “do you remember?”

“I remember some,” he says haltingly, his gaze flickering between her face and the plate of sausage. His breakfast so far has done little to quell his hunger, and now that he’s begun to eat, he isn’t sure that he can stop. 

“Eat,” she says gently. “To transform fully, as you did — surely it must deplete you.”

Ethan freezes. “To transform — _what_?”

Vanessa looks electric. The sun behind her sets the ends of her hair on fire. “That’s what’s so exciting, Mr. Chandler. Have you ever eaten properly before a full moon?”

“Not to my recollection,” says Ethan slowly, struggling to make sense of what she’s saying. “Not if I could help it. Mostly I tried whiskey.”

Vanessa nods. “I wonder,” she says, sipping her tea thoughtfully, “if your body hasn’t had enough stamina to complete the transformation in the past. When I saw you at the Pooles’ mansion, it seemed you had only made it ... halfway. You still seemed very _man_ -like, if you understand.”

Truth is creeping over Ethan’s shoulders like spring dew, cold and hopeful. “Are you saying I turned into a wolf?” he asks, just to make sure he’s hearing this correctly. “Not some kind of monster?”

“A very large wolf,” says Vanessa, the corners of her mouth turning up. “I would guess that your head came to my hip, at least.” She sets down her teacup. “You did seem a bit bewildered. Afraid, perhaps. You spent most of the evening curled in the corner growling at me. But don’t worry — I came back upstairs when you shifted back without your clothes.”

She tips a cheeky smile toward him, but he can’t manage to smile back yet, feeling the warmth drain from his face. His heart is stuttering. “But — the chains?” he asks, feeling his hands start to shake in his lap. “Did I hurt you?”

He watches her decide to tell him. “You nipped at me,” she admits, and the air goes out of him. “But that was my fault. I tried to coax you out of the corner, and you gave me a warning, I suppose. You didn’t come after me. When I backed away, you left me alone. In fact, you seemed quite determined _not_ to hurt me.”

His chest is cold and taut, and he struggles to breathe around it. He doesn’t remember _that_. “I bit you?”

She holds out her hand and shows him a small wound on its back. It’s not deep, more a scratch than a proper bite, but he still swallows hard, willing his breakfast to stay where it is. “Hardly. I think you wanted me to stay away.”

He stares at his plate, unable to look at her. Vanessa covers his hand with hers. “You didn’t hurt me,” she says carefully, slowly. “You set a boundary. I overstepped. The fault was mine.”

He exhales, shakily. “You don’t blame me.”

“Of course not.” 

“I remember —” he falters, trying to dig deeper into his wolf brain. “You read to me. You were sitting on the floor.”

She smiles. “Yes. I tried everything to make you feel comfortable. I brought you some water, I read to you, I knotted some rope for you to chew on, but you wanted none of it. You stayed tucked in your corner like a chastised dog. _But_ ,” she adds, her eyebrows arching over her coffee cup, “you fell asleep after I read for a bit, and you slept very deeply. You didn’t even wake when you shifted back.”

The warmth floods back to his cheeks with embarrassing vigor. A measure of relief is breaking over him in a soft orange wash, the first slice of dawn after a long night, and even if the furl of worry in his chest isn’t undone entirely, it’s looser now. “I’m sorry that you saw — I’ll, uh — I’ll bring a blanket next time.”

Vanessa spears a sausage on her fork and takes a bite off the end. “Not to worry, Mr. Chandler. I assure you, that was the least of my concerns upon finding myself in the cellar with a wolf.”

Ethan frowns, his chest tightening again, but as he watches her take another bite of the sausage, hunger moves in his stomach with the unsteady shift of an earthquake. He makes a small unconscious noise, almost a whimper, and Vanessa pushes the platter toward him, her pale eyes finding his.

“Eat,” she says again, that animal thing waking up in her eyes, and this time Ethan heeds her.

He eats so quickly it almost scares him. He can’t remember what it feels like to eat when he shifts, but he imagines that it must be something like this — thoughtless, primal, satiation his only goal. 

He loses count of how many times he refills his plate, though Vanessa is watching with an intent concentration that suggests she’s keeping track. At first, he avoids her eyes as he wolfs mouthful after mouthful. He’s eaten heartily in front of her before, but never to excess, never until he could feel his stomach start to press against the waistband of his trousers. Somewhere, deep within the recesses of his mind, he thinks he should be embarrassed by this kind of indulgence, but the primitive reward of it is too great right now. He’ll worry later, once the animal part of his brain lets him think about something other than filling his stomach.

There are only a few bites of eggs and potatoes left when he finally sits back, panting. His skin feels hot, stretched thin, his stomach like it might split any moment. Even still, he eyes the remainder of the food, equal parts desirous and sick at the thought of finishing it. But there’s only a small amount, and it’s right there, and he’s already eaten _so_ much — 

He hiccups, grabs for his napkin to stifle the sound, and slumps farther down in his chair. He’s so full he can feel his stomach crowding his lungs as it expands, keeping his breaths shallow and strained. There’s a heat falling over him like the sun rising from a cool desert night, prickling and welcome, somnolent. 

“Did you have enough?” Vanessa asks, and he nods, eyes closed. Like she can read his mind — and Christ, maybe she can — she probes, “There’s only a bit left. You might as well finish it.”

“You want it?” he manages. He hiccups again, but doesn’t quite catch it in time. “Christ. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” she says, scooting her chair closer to him. “Have the rest, I’m quite satisfied.”

He nods, his bloated belly heaving. “Just need a minute.”

“And perhaps some help,” she says, and his eyes flicker open to watch her scoop the remaining eggs and potatoes onto his plate. Confidentially, her voice dropping an octave, she admits, “I may have gotten a bit overzealous with the potatoes.”

He cracks a smile despite the mounting discomfort in his stomach. “Well, you didn’t make more than I could eat, so I’d say no.”

She gathers some of the food on the end of her fork and holds it out to him, and it’s only a quick flicker, but for a moment he’s back in the cellar, Vanessa holding a hand out to him. He blinks, shudders, and she steadies him with a palm on his knee. 

“Just a bit more,” she prompts, taking his hand with her free one. He hangs onto it, the pressure of her grip giving him a point of focus that isn’t his throbbing belly. 

She raises her eyebrows, and he nods, opening his mouth. She feeds him the mouthful of potatoes, and despite how stuffed he is, the tenderness in the action is such that he thinks he would eat another full breakfast on top of this one just to have Vanessa feed it to him. 

She holds another bite to his lips, but he holds up a hand as another hiccup rolls up from his gut. She smiles without her teeth, and his stomach tries and fails to swoop under its heavy load. Instead, he nudges her knee with his, and she gently pushes the food into his mouth. He doesn’t know how he’s still eating, but every mouthful he swallows pushes him further toward the same cottony, eyes-rolled-back satisfaction that rolled over him that morning on the moors.

She offers him another bite, and as he chews and swallows, she moves her hand to his stomach, tipping her gaze toward him as if to ask for permission. He nods, exhaling hard, and she palms over the swollen expanse of his stomach. She’s excruciatingly gentle, and a tiny moan escapes him before he can stop it.

“Should I stop?” she asks, and he shakes his head. He can feel his heartbeat in his stomach, a dull thud that draws all of his attention to just how much he’s gorged himself, how much food it takes to fill him after shifting. Vanessa takes her hand from his stomach, and he mourns its absence, but she’s too quick to fill his mouth for him to say anything. 

She feeds him another bite, and then another, and then the last. He can barely breathe around the bounty in his belly, and he arches his hips a little to see if it will offer any relief. But everything churns in his stomach when he moves, and he deflates, winded, and catches a belch in his fist. His stomach whines, a deep, roiling sound that rides the line between human and animal. 

Amusement is playing on Vanessa’s face, hand in hand with something harder to read. “Perhaps you should lie down,” she says, offering her hand.

It takes two tries for him to heave himself out of the kitchen chair, the contents of his stomach shifting uncomfortably with the movement. He sways, his balance thrown off by the tremendous weight of his breakfast, and Vanessa steadies him with a gentle hand on his hip. 

She helps him to the parlor, and he eases onto the sofa, whining with the effort of moving around his overfilled stomach. She perches on the very edge and lets him lay his head in her lap, closing his eyes when her hand comes to rest in his hair. 

“May I touch you?” Vanessa asks quietly, and Ethan nods against her thigh, hiccuping. Her hand follows the dip from his ribs toward his hips, then slips down to his stomach, splaying over its curve before applying a bit of pressure, and he groans again at how good it feels. He belches carefully, another soft moan escaping after it, and he wills his stomach to let him lie in her lap without embarrassing himself quite so often.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, even more quietly. Curiosity brims in her voice, and his worries that she’s disgusted by his overindulgence recede some. 

He shakes his head. He’s uncomfortable, to be sure. His stomach is heavy, a dull ache spreading through it, and his mind is slow and sleepy, but it isn’t unpleasant — a more gluttonous version of the thick, woolly calm that drapes over him after a few hits from one of Vanessa’s cannabis cigarettes. As her hand rubs circles over his swollen belly, it gets harder to keep his eyes open, and he meets Vanessa’s hand with his own for a moment and squeezes it.

“Have you eaten like this before?” Vanessa asks. Her voice has slid into baritone, barely audible. 

Ethan belches and tries to reposition to put less pressure on his stomach, but it’s impossible to find a position he could call _comfortable_. “Not as a man.”

“Does it feel good?” 

He nods again, and she makes a soft sound in the back of her throat, almost a growl. “Fascinating,” she murmurs, stroking through his hair with her other hand and tucking it behind his ear. 

He keeps dipping into the edge of sleep, dozing and then jolting awake with a hiccup. Vanessa whispers soft things he can’t quite wrap his mind around, maybe poetry, maybe Latin, maybe just the sweet nonsense of soothing an animal. He thinks hazily that maybe he’s finally found a path to contentment without the squirm of guilt: he’s packed so full that there isn’t any room left to doubt that he’s deserving. 

When he opens his eyes again, the clock reads nearly half past two, and Vanessa is gone. He must have slept deeply, because she extricated herself from beneath him and tucked a pillow under his head without his waking up. He turns over onto his back experimentally — he still feels heavy, but less stuffed to the gills than he did earlier. At least he can breathe without belching now, he thinks, turning back to his side. 

There’s a note on the end table, and he picks it up blearily. Vanessa has gone out; she’ll be back soon, not to worry. _With love_ , they always sign notes back and forth, and the more mundane it is, the more it soothes something deep in most primal part of Ethan’s brain. _I’m going out for milk. With love, Vanessa. Out for a walk, back soon. With love, Vanessa. I’ve gone for tea with Victor. With love, Vanessa_ — to think that he deserves that kind of affection, doled out like change to a child on the street. It’s hard to look at straight on, the bright glance of sun off the water. 

He plumps the pillow beneath his cheek and rolls onto his side again, and lets himself drift back to sleep. He’s gonna have to do this all again in a few hours.


	5. the emperor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "how to rest," the crane wives

Vanessa wraps her coat more tightly around her as she walks briskly through the streets, burning so vigorously inside that she’s sure she radiates some sort of glow. It wouldn’t be among the strangest things she’s experienced, certainly. 

Ostensibly, she’s out to pick up something for supper, having realized that Ethan might require a bit more than she’d expected over the course of the next few days. But the longer she stayed with his head in her lap, the less she could parse her feelings about the situation clearly, so she’d eased out from beneath Ethan’s sleeping form and slipped outside. The cold air is easier on her mind, and as she walks she turns the situation over in her head like an hourglass, hoping it will make more sense if she moves its parts around a little. The clatter and bustle of the streets helps, too, jangling her out of her head and reminding her that there’s a whole world outside of feelings she can’t understand. 

She’s never seen anyone eat like that before — neither in quantity nor unabashed enthusiasm. Or perhaps not  _ unabashed _ , but that was part of it, too. The helpless, embarrassed little sounds he made, how it seemed that the entire world fell away but for the food in front of him. When she’d fed him from her own fork, he’d looked so cowed by the tenderness of the gesture that she’d felt her chest constrict. And then afterward, on the parlor sofa, he’d looked so completely — she isn’t sure. Indulged? Domestic? Satiated? There was something magnetic about seeing him overwhelmed by the physical effects of eating so much — the flush of his cheeks as he dozed in her lap, the heavy, sweet slump of his body over hers, the bloated curve of his stomach pushing out beneath his trousers, jumping with each hiccup. 

It smoulders in a way she can’t quite name — it’s not sexual desire, exactly, but she’s fairly certain that it’s not  _ normal _ , either. She catches her wry smile in a shop window as she passes. Nothing about her feelings for Ethan are normal, it would seem. Why shouldn’t they continue to blaze yet another new trail within her?

She’ll ask the cards when she gets home. No sense in worrying about it without the proper tools to examine it, she tells herself, and pulls her coat even tighter around herself as she lets herself into the butcher’s shop.

As the butcher prepares the cuts of meat she requested, her gaze lights on a pile of marrow bones behind the counter. Sembene buys them for stock, but when Vanessa was younger, and her family had dogs, the cook gave them bones to keep busy while her mother entertained. It might help Ethan warm up to the cellar, she thinks. A monster is only a monster if you treat it like one, she thinks, and perhaps  _ that’s  _ why she wants to treat him so softly. 

His wolf form looked so — neglected. She would call Ethan’s human body more sturdy than thin, but she couldn’t help but notice how his wolf’s ribs showed through his fur. Perhaps his weight distributes differently when he shifts, she thinks. Either way, he looks like he could use some taking care of. She’d tried so hard last night to tempt him with fresh water, with bits of bread and sausage, varying the pitch of her voice as she read to him to see if one consoled him better than another, but he’d resolutely bundled himself into the corner and growled, unwilling to come any closer. 

She sighs. Maybe she can still tempt him out. “And a few of those marrow bones,” she says over the counter. “Three, if you please. Large ones, if you can.”

“Making soup?” the butcher asks, wrapping the bones in paper. “Freezing out there, innit?”

Vanessa gives her best cryptic smile. “I’ve actually a large dog I’m looking to keep busy,” she says, passing some coins over the counter. “But I might spare one for soup, now that you mention it.”

Soup would be good, she thinks, making her way toward the market. Warm, filling, something to fortify Ethan for the long night to come.  _ And easy to feed him, if he wants _ , her mind supplies, and she raises her shoulders against the thought as though it’s a cold blast of storm wind she can fend off. Instead, she focuses her attention on how to make him feel safe without the security of the chains to restrain him. There’s plenty of heavy rope in the cellar of Grandage Place, and she knows enough complicated knots that she’s reasonably confident in her ability to figure out a harness of some kind. 

She collects her groceries and takes a carriage home, but the weight of the packages in her lap brings her mind back to the feeling of him earlier. He looked so content, spread across her lap, his breathing shallow. His stomach had been so firm under her palm, filled to its limits. She’s spent enough nights curled against Ethan in bed to know that he has a small push of fat around his navel, imperceptible under his trousers and vests during the day. But sometimes the shirt he sleeps in pulls just right, and she catches the quickest glimpse before the fabric blouses over it again. Vanessa loves that little push of fat. It’s so human, so vulnerable, so diametrically opposed to the tough, imposing figure he cuts out on the street — just like behind that imposing figure, there’s a soft man with kind hands who likes to have his hair pet and can fall asleep anywhere, as long as Vanessa is near. She wonders if he’s always had that little paunch, or if it comes from too much drink on the road with the Wild West show, or even from the steady stream of good meals Grandage Place has provided him. 

Ethan is still asleep when she arrives home, flipped onto his back now, one arm cushioning his face against the back of the sofa. He’s snoring gently, but he stirs when Vanessa tousles his hair. She bends to kiss the top of his head, and he snuffles and makes about a quarter turn onto his side, pushing his face deeper into the crook of his arm. He looks soft and young, and Vanessa — daringly, she thinks — gives him a quick pat on his stomach. 

“Time’s it?” he mumbles into his elbow, and Vanessa touches the top of his head again.

“Sleep. I’ll be back in a while.”

She tucks the groceries into the larder, then retires to her study and shuffles her cards, knocking on them three times and murmuring a greeting as she squares them against the heel of her hand and shuffles again. The first time she laid out her cards after the debacle at the Poole mansion, she’d hovered her hand over them, bracing for the possibility that she might no longer feel any of the energy coming off them, that she might have bargained her mediumship away with her demons. But the hum of the cards still whispered up to her, and wild, jagged relief had leapt through her — she hadn’t realized how the thought of losing her intuition frightened her until it had been spread in front of her in seventy-eight different shards.

She’d spent the next week dragging Ethan out to the most haunted places in London, testing what she could and couldn’t feel, if she could still sense spirits. She’s been perversely delighted to find that she still can — they just feel at arm’s length now, rather than clustered at her shoulders. Her attunement feels different, too — finer, purer, the clean ring of a harp string rather than the deep, fuzzing low of a cello — but the sensation is the same, like a tuning fork to the tips of her nerves. 

(Ethan had bounded along beside her, inspecting the names on gravestones in Highgate Cemetery and trailing behind her through the Theatre Royal and Westminster Abbey, the wariness on his face turning to thrill the longer they walked unaccosted.) 

Now, she fans the cards out in front of her and closes her eyes, lets her mind fill with Ethan, the glut of confusing feelings that surround him. The warmth of him beside her in bed, his kind, tender hands on her waist. The push of his stomach under her hands earlier, the soft sounds of satiety he’d made. The stake her emotions have planted between companionship and romance, unwilling to choose a side. She lets her hand drift over the spectrum of the cards until she feels three specters of warmth. She turns them over: Eight of Swords; Three of Cups; the Hierophant, reversed. 

She exhales heavily. Although they don’t clarify much in the way of her feelings, the cards are mostly reassuring. The Hierophant, reversed: forging a new path against convention. The Three of Cups: intimacy, happiness. But that Eight of Swords: her prison is of her own making.

Folding her arms tightly across her chest, she leaves the cards on the table and strides to the window, as if the frigid street outside will offer any counsel. Vanessa is skilled at evading prisons of  _ others’ _ making: societal convention, patriarchal expectations, possession. She is good at removing herself from supernatural situations with cleverness and mettle. She is … not so skilled at navigating personal entanglements. She is curt, she is strange, she is built for the barren loneliness of the moors. She is not good at being loved, and she imagines she can’t be much good at loving, either. What practice has she had that hasn’t finaled in disaster? 

“Vanessa?” calls Ethan, and she starts. 

“In my study,” she calls back, and hurriedly turns the cards back over on the table, though she knows they’ll mean nothing to Ethan. Leaving them face-up feels too much like leaving her whole self on display.

He appears in the doorway a moment later, stretching his arms above his head. The movement arches his back, pulling the fabric of his undershirt taut against the still-bloated push of his stomach. Vanessa catches her breath, redirecting her gaze to a wisp of dust on her sleeve until he lowers his arms and the fabric goes slack over his waist again. 

“Did you go out?” he asks, wandering across the room. She nods and angles herself back to the window, and, gently, he wraps his arms around her waist and rests his chin atop her head. The hard swell of his belly presses against her back, and she bites her lip.

“How’s your hand?” he asks, and she blinks — she’d forgotten about it. 

“Quite fine,” she says, resting her hands on his. “Healing already. Did you sleep well?”

He nods. “Not a single dream.”

“And how do you feel?” she asks, against her better judgment. “You ate quite a lot.”

Ethan tenses slightly against her. “If I offended —”

“No, no,” she interrupts, turning in his arms to face him. “Not at all. You needed it. But you seemed a bit — overwhelmed by it, this morning. You could barely keep your eyes open.”

The tension falls from his shoulders, and she keeps an intent watch on his face to see how he takes her talking about it. A little color rises to his cheeks, but the crease between his eyebrows evens out, and he smiles ruefully. 

“I may have gotten overzealous,” he says, scrubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. She allows her hands to find his waist, to thumb at the spot where his stomach curves out slightly.

“Well,” she says, “you’ll be glad to know I bought plenty for supper. And something to sustain you through the night as well.”

“Miss Ives!” he says, feigning surprise. “You’re gonna spoil me.”

Vanessa is positive he can feel her heartbeat hammering at her ribs. “Perhaps,” she says, brushing his hair from his face. “Would you object?”

“To you? Never,” he says, so passionately, so easily, that some of her apprehension dissipates. “Though I’ve been thinking — I don’t like the idea of being without chains down there. If I can slip out of them as a wolf, they’re not doing much good. Maybe you should stay up here tonight.”

She tucks his hair behind his ears, and he closes his eyes. “I think I have a solution,” she says softly. “Let me look at a few things.”

He nods, bringing his forehead to hers. “Thank you,” he says. “For this morning, too. It meant a lot to be treated like — to be cared for.”

She touches his cheek, just the pads of her fingers at first and then flattening her whole palm to cup his jaw. “You deserve to be cared for,” she says softly. “You’re not the monster you think you are.”

His caught breath tells her he’s still not all the way to believing it. “Neither are you,” he murmurs, but even without her demons proper, Vanessa knows herself well enough to know that it isn’t true. 

She follows him back to the parlor and settles beside him on the sofa, picking up her volume on animal behavior and opening to the dog-eared page where she left off. Ethan leans against her shoulder, skimming a few pages with her before returning to his dime novel. 

The next thing she knows, she’s blinking awake, the deep blue evening creeping in through the windows. There’s a quilt draped over her, and a steaming cup of tea on the table beside her, a couple of biscuits on its saucer. Her book has been placed next to her, her page carefully folded over. The scent of something savory and aromatic is wafting out from the kitchen, and she wraps the quilt around her shoulders and takes her tea to investigate.

Ethan is moving between the fireplace and the stove with a practiced rhythm, stirring and checking and tasting, a dishcloth draped over his shoulder. Vanessa pauses in the doorway, her heart swelling as she watches. 

He slips the dishcloth off his shoulder and uses it to pull something out of the oven. He tastes it, nods, and slides it back in, and Vanessa raises her teacup to hide her smile. As he’s wiping his hands, he turns just enough to catch sight of her, and his face fills with light.

“You’re up!” he says, smiling. “Supper’ll be ready soon. I wasn’t sure if you had plans for those bones, so I didn’t touch ’em. But I’ve got a roast going, and some rice, some vegetables — are you hungry?”

She nods. “Yes, thank you. Are  _ you _ ?”

He grins crookedly at her, flipping the dishcloth back over his shoulder. “Starving. How’s your tea?”

“It’s still hot,” she says, raising the cup to him. “I’m very impressed with your timing.”

Ethan’s grin turns sheepish. “The first two cups got cold.”

She sets her cup on the counter and wraps her arm around his waist, tilting her head against his shoulder for a quick moment. He hangs on, kissing her hair, and she lets herself be pulled against him, drinking in his warmth.

“Sleep well?” he asks softly, and she nods. “You can sleep tonight instead of coming down. I don’t mind.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” she says, stepping out of the hug. “But that reminds me: I need to prepare our alternative restraints while you’re cooking, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Bring ’em out here if you can,” he says, making pleading eyes at her. “I have separation anxiety, don’t you forget.”

“All right,” she relents. “One moment.”

She retrieves a length of rope from the cellar and perches on the part of the counter that Ethan hasn’t commandeered, tying several thick sailor’s knots that she’s reasonably sure his wolf teeth won’t be able to destroy. 

“Where’d you learn those?” he asks, and she smiles. 

“Sir Malcolm. He’d come home and teach us when we were children. I never forgot.”

“And … what are you gonna do with it?”

She looks between Ethan and the mess of rope in her lap, trying to estimate how much give she’ll need. “I  _ think  _ … if I can get the shape right … it might make a passable harness. Here, leave the stove a moment and try this on.”

She slides off the counter and holds the rope against his chest. “Arms here,” she instructs, and Ethan obediently slips his arms through the loops she’s created. “All right … stay still, if you can. Let me …”

She loops the rope around his shoulders and sets to tying a sturdy slipknot, giving him enough room to wriggle out of it but making sure it pulls snug when she takes a few steps back from him. “I should think that would hold you, no?” she says, giving it another experimental tug. Ethan grunts. “Too snug?”

He shakes his head, and she circles back around so she can see his face. She expects tension, maybe discomfort, but his eyes are soft, his lower lip pulled between his teeth in a cautious smile. “It’s tight,” he says, “but that’s preferable.”

“I think you’ll have enough fur here,” she says, touching his chest, “that it won’t chafe, but of course we can find a way around that if it isn’t so. Furthermore, it should only get tight if you yank against it, and I don’t think you will. How do you feel?”

He considers as she carefully extricates him from the harness without disturbing the knots. “Reassured,” he says finally. “Still a little anxious, I think. I don’t like that I touched you.”

“I’ll let you come to me this time,” she promises. “When you’re ready.”

He takes the rope from her and lays it on the counter, then gathers her in his arms, resting his chin on her head. “You’re too good to me, Miss Ives.”

“Please,” she counters, lacing her arms around his middle. Can she still feel the bloat of his breakfast, or is she imagining it? “You made me three cups of tea so I’d wake up to a hot one.”

“How about this?” he asks, nuzzling at her hair. “We’re good to each other.”

_ We’re good to each other _ , Vanessa echoes desperately to herself, and she thinks: it is this. A kiss on her hair rather than her lips. A reassurance rather than a love token. An embrace without any carnal desire. 

But with the full moon ahead of them, Ethan surely has enough on his mind without Vanessa pressing him for answers to her complicated emotional quandaries, so instead she contents herself with the knowledge that Ethan has never used being good to her as leverage to ask anything more than she’s comfortable giving. She kisses his forehead lightly, and she ties her knots ever tighter, like she can braid a wish into the rope if she just pulls hard enough.


	6. the hierophant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "it will come back," hozier

Ethan thinks he’s eaten more in the past three days than he usually eats in a week, but he has to admit — this is the first full moon that hasn’t left him feeling completely wrung out. He feels less pinched, less haggard, after three nights of shifting on a full stomach, and when he sleeps, it’s dreamless. There’s something deeply satisfying about filling himself beyond his limits, a reminder of his humanness to keep him grounded.

Less satisfying are the reports Vanessa gives him over breakfast, how feral and unwilling the wolf is to accept her company. That he’d devoured the bones and scraps she brought along but spent the rest of the night pacing anxiously, his ears back and his tail tucked low. That he hasn’t tried to break free of the rope harness, but he still growls when she approaches him. He hadn’t realized until he heard otherwise how much he’d been hanging onto the impossible hope that a bit of care would make a difference, free his worries from the cage they pace in between his ribs. He made Vanessa swear that she’d tell him of any other injury he caused, however small, but she has nothing new to show for her nights in the cellar. Small relief, but he still can’t shake the horror that he wounded her even once. 

They spend the first few days after the full moon collecting spare blankets and pillows from beneath the dust covers in Grandage Place’s innumerable empty rooms, so that next month Ethan can curl up on something besides the stone-cold cellar floor. It’s way too much house for two people, he thinks, as they traipse through room after room, but despite the noises Vanessa occasionally makes about returning to the moors, he thinks she’s attached to the old place, creaking and melancholic as it is. They’ve strung up a length of rope across an empty drawing room, sheets and blankets draped over the line like old ghosts, tall windows thrown despite the cold air as they beat out the dust of decades past.

Vanessa rears back for a particularly vicious stroke, and he watches the slim line of her body move. But no attraction blooms in the pit of his belly — he’d liken the feeling more closely to fondness. Admiration, maybe. A yank of connection, as if there’s some cosmic thread binding them together — like meeting like.

“I wonder,” says Vanessa, pausing mid-beat, “if you could stay somewhere else when you shifted.”

Ethan lowers his beater, a sprout of discomfort poking its head through the weight in his stomach. He finished off the last of the previous night’s stew on top of his breakfast a few hours ago, and he can feel the push of his stomach against the waistband of his trousers with every swipe he takes at the blanket in front of him. He felt pleasantly overfull before they set to cleaning, but now — he isn’t sure. 

“Somewhere else?” he says, willing his voice to stay light. He doesn’t want to sway her if she does want him out. “You thinking of evicting me, Miss Ives?” He wouldn’t blame her, truly. It’s a lot to ask to keep a wild animal in the house for three nights a month, and the amount of food it takes to keep him tame is probably untenable in the long term, and maybe it’s time to leave anyway, he’s probably vastly overstayed his welcome by now, and — 

“Of course not,” says Vanessa, turning soft eyes on him, but the ball of roots in his stomach doesn’t loosen. “I mean here, upstairs. If we can acclimate you to the cellar, perhaps we could eventually move you upstairs. It might make some difference not to treat you quite as much like an animal.”

She offers him an encouraging smile, but he can’t smile back. 

“I  _ am  _ an animal,” he says, his hands growing tighter around his beater. The past few nights could be a fluke, some brief diversion of his wolf brain as it contends with the overwhelming stimuli of food and company and a fully animal body. It rends him in two to imagine Vanessa settling in with her books and blankets next month only to have her throat ripped out. “We have no idea what I’ll be like next month. If it’s just luck I haven’t killed you by now.”

Vanessa gives her blanket another whack. “I don’t think there’s a version of you that could kill me.”

He heaves his beater at the rug in front of him. “Well, I don’t want to find out!”

Another whack, and her blanket coughs out another cloud of dust. “Well,  _ I _ think it’s worth considering.”

“And I think you’re asking for trouble.” He raises his beater to start in on a throw, but lowers it again when his stomach twinges — from the movement or his imaginings, he isn’t sure — and he tries to soothe it with some pressure from his palm. “I don’t know, Vanessa,” he says heavily. “I don’t trust it yet. It’s only been a few nights.”

She swings at her blanket so ferociously that Ethan wryly thinks that maybe she ought to start bringing the beater into the cellar with her. “ _ I _ trust you,” she says stubbornly. “My own mind poses more of a threat to my life than you do, Ethan.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” he argues. “Give it another month. I’m not ready to put you at risk like that.”

She pulls the blanket off the line and hauls it out to the pile they’ve created in the hall. When she returns, she’s swiping dust from the clean black lines of her satin pajamas, her bare feet soundless on the hardwood floors. There are dust motes settled in the precarious pile of her hair, and Ethan reaches over to pluck them out. 

“I appreciate your faith in me,” he says softly. “I do. I just need more time.”

But the more he whales on lifeless blankets and pillowcases, the more the weight in his stomach starts to churn. The past few nights have to be a fluke. They  _ have  _ to be. He can see it down the barrel of the future, sure as a headshot, building a life here just to wreck it with his own two hands. And with Vanessa the only one here to bear the brunt of his monstrosity when he finally loses his handle on it — it’s too much to bear.

Besides, there’s a box he needs to fit into if he stays with Vanessa, and even  _ without  _ his inherent monstrosity, he knows he’s got elbows and knees poking out, a claustrophobia that won’t let him sit — stay — settle down. For all he  _ gets  _ Vanessa, understands on a molecular level that they’re meant to be around each other, he has a hard time reading what she wants. She’s so staid, so buttoned-up, and Ethan is a wild, sprawling mess of a man, unsure of where, exactly, he fits beside her. He knows what he’s supposed to do, what he’s supposed to want, how he’s supposed to want to touch — he’s played that part a hundred times over, slapped it on as easily as stage makeup. He knows what it is to want someone, but the way he wants Vanessa — he can’t make it fit. How the fuck is he supposed to build a life with her if he can’t even love her right? 

He drags in a breath. Across the room, Vanessa is beating a rug into submission. His stomach makes a taxed, uncomfortable sound, and he presses a hand to it again. A couple of hours ago, he was gorging himself, overcome with the relief that he’d passed another harmless night, and he tries to work his way back to that feeling, grateful and sated.

He takes another breath, deeper, taking a desperate swing at the blanket in front of him. It’s all right, he tells himself. He’s doing this for Vanessa, and her notion that the wolf can be wrestled into submission, too. He can let himself indulge her for a while and then regroup.

Maybe it’s the hours spent twisting his body this way and that beating the hell out of blankets that upsets his stomach, or maybe it’s the prospect of a future. But it sloshes again, louder, and Vanessa turns toward him, her eyebrows raised. Heat rises to his cheeks, and he busies himself whacking at the blanket until he senses her approaching from behind him. He pauses, beater in midair, and cautiously drops his hands when Vanessa’s arms settle around his waist. 

“Do you feel all right?” she asks, her chin bony against his back, and he feels his breathing even out at the sound of her voice. “Your stomach seems to have some complaints.”

He covers one of her hands with his. Her hands are always so  _ cold _ . “Think I ate too much. I’ll be fine.”

She rubs a gentle hand over the bloated curve of his belly, and he struggles not to sag against her. Ethan likes to be touched, he knows that of himself, but sometimes it gets so that even the most casual of contact can knock him clean out in its simple affection. She feels so steady against him, the first sweet lick of shade on a summer day. 

“Would a hot water bottle help?” Vanessa asks, the deep timbre of her voice traveling up his spine. “I know where Sembene keeps them.” She stands on her toes, her chin brushing at his shoulder, and adds, her voice dropping even lower, “I’ll even brush your hair and read to you while you recover, if you’d like.”

He wants it so badly, but it feels too easy, a step over the threshold into a life he hasn’t earned. A hot water bottle for a stomach ache, company to distract him from his discomfort. Any other day, he’d count an upset stomach as punishment for whatever horrors he’d committed the night before. He’s been sicker than this and pushed through it, thinking maybe it would help him atone.

But. Vanessa’s chin nudges at his shoulder. Her hands knead gently at his swollen stomach, ebbing away some of the pressure. He swallows a belch. He cannot, he tells himself sternly, let himself fall in love with a future where he looks forward to shifting in a nest of pillows and blankets, to chasing his transformations with enough breakfast to sate even his wildest hunger, to lying with Vanessa’s hands in his hair and on his stomach, soothing even the slightest discomfort.

He is  _ only  _ indulging her, he tells himself, and he tries not to notice how everything in him settles when he tells her yes.


	7. the lovers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "baptisms," radical face

As someone who has often felt that she was made for solitary eldritch rituals rather than domestic life, Vanessa is continually surprised by how much she enjoys simply — _living_ . She still reads her cards daily, accepts some engagements reading fortunes, consulting on spiritualist matters, or, occasionally, communicating with spirits haunting friends of Mr. Lyle’s. Without the worry of possession, she finds that she _enjoys_ speaking with spirits. Most of them are just lonely, or annoyed, or eager for someone to converse with, and she’s happy to help. 

She returns from a simple poltergeist errand one afternoon to find Ethan lounging on the staircase just inside, a novel lying open across his thighs. He leaps up when she shuts the door behind her, closing the book around one finger to keep his page.

“Hi!” he says, grabbing her in a quick hug before she can even take her coat off. “How’d you do?”

“Waiting for me?” she asks, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it up. “I wasn’t away that long, was I?”

Ethan shrugs, hanging at her shoulder. “Not that long, I guess. It just gets quiet here without you, and I heard you coming.”

She kisses his cheek. “It is rather a lot of house for two people. At least if we had a poltergeist, you’d have company when I’m away.”

“Was it tough?” he asks, herding her gently toward the kitchen and filling the kettle. “I’ve heard they’re nasty things.”

She shakes her head. “Just pesky. She needed someone to be stern with her.”

“Aw, well, I’m sure you did the job just fine,” he says with a grin, hoisting himself up onto the counter. His cheeks are fuller now than they used to be, and they push up sweetly when he smiles. 

Domestic life certainly agrees with Ethan, as well. In the few weeks since the last full moon, Vanessa has noticed an uptick in his appetite — not quite on par with his lunar voracity, but certainly more than usual. She’s careful not to dissuade him — if food is what it takes for him to care for himself and feel less like a monster, then so be it. Eating a bit too much is far preferable to starving himself to try to numb the beast inside him.

His appetite has added some weight to his frame — rather quickly, Vanessa thinks, though she supposes he’s no longer constantly running around the city in pursuit of evil forces, either. Perhaps his body processes excess differently due to his condition — like a wild animal storing fat for the winter. Whatever the reason, she likes how it looks on him: like he’s comfortable, settled, well-taken-care-of. The slight strain on the buttons of his vest, the pucker of his trouser seams around his thighs, his soft cheeks — they make her want to squeeze him. There’s something about the thought that he’s eating not just enough to survive, but enough to gain a bit of extra weight, that makes everything in her go soft and melted.

It feels strange, untoward, to be so interested in the size of his hips or the swell of his stomach, and it seems stranger that he hasn’t made any mention of it, but it almost makes sense when she frames filling out as something human he can latch onto. For such a long time, it felt like only her grief kept her human. Now, more and more often, it’s her companionship with Ethan. His gentleness reminds her to be gentle with herself, and she appreciates this visual proof that Ethan is being gentle with himself, too. 

“What are you looking at?” he asks playfully, reaching for her, and she splays her hands over his knees and draws in closer. 

“I just like the picture of you,” she says, tracing along the line of his thighs. “You look well. Cared for.”

It feels daring to say, but he just smiles, hooking a loose ringlet behind her ear, and she feels something in her settle when he doesn’t protest her words. Instead, he bumps his forehead against hers and says, “I’ve got you to thank for that, Miss Ives.”

The next day, they take a walk through London’s center, arm in arm. It’s a capricious sort of spring day, sunny and warm undercut by a wicked breeze, and she’s grateful for Ethan’s bulk at her side to block the brunt of the wind. His coat is pulled more snugly than usual around his hips and midsection, its normally boxy shape made lumpy by his changing figure. She finds it inordinately charming, and when he smiles at her, the early March sunshine streaming over his face, the joyful roundness of his cheeks is enough to make her melt even with the chilly breeze.

A familiar face catches her eye, and she cranes her neck to follow it. Ethan, noticing, turns, too, but it’s too late — the slight figure is already gone.

Ethan tilts his head at her, questioning, and she smiles gently. “Mr. Gray,” she says, “but I’m afraid we’ve missed him.”

“ _Ah_ ,” says Ethan meaningfully. “Wonder how he’s doing.”

Vanessa does, too, but she’s caught up in the way that when she caught sight of Dorian, her first thought was of how thin he was, how underfed he looks, is he taking care of himself, and suddenly the missing piece slots into place in her chest.

She is _taking care of someone_. In every change she notices in Ethan’s body, every new soft curve, the strain of every button, she can see tangible proof that she knows how to love someone, how to care for them. Ethan’s burgeoning softness is wonderful to curl up against, comforting and safe to sink into, but in every kilogram he gains, she can also see the evidence of their partnership, their affection, their determination to forge a softer, happier life for themselves.

She stumbles a little along the uneven streets, the realization is so relieving, and Ethan catches her easily, pressing her against the swell of his side, its shape muffled under his coat.

“All right there, Miss Ives?” he asks, and she nods. Perhaps this doesn’t answer her many other questions about how to satisfy her strange terms for partnership, but it gives her one answer, and for just a moment, that feels like the world.


	8. the chariot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "something good," the show ponies

Vanessa decides to learn to cook properly. She’s never had a knack for consumable spellwork beyond knowing which herbs do what, but she sets to cooking with a determination Ethan has only heretofore seen her focus on the occult. It’s deeply charming. 

When the full moon arrived a couple days ago, she reported that although he still hadn’t come close to her, he’d left the corner he usually tucked himself into, and crossed the cellar halfway, regarding her with a sort of bewildered curiosity rather than abject fear. The next night, she’d rolled an apple toward him and he’d pounced on it, tail wagging inquisitively, and he’d batted it around a bit before devouring it. Then, last night, she’d knotted some rope into a crude toy, and he had allowed her —

“To hold the other end,” he’d filled in, remembering. Vanessa, in the blouse of her pajamas and a pair of loose sleep pants she’d taken from his room, hanging onto a loop of rope for dear life, and him, trying to yank it away from her. When he pulled too aggressively, she’d let go, and he’d stumbled backward across the uneven stone floor, the rope tethering him going slack. _Oh, Ethan, I’m so sorry_ , she had laughed, and he _remembered_ — her tone, her voice, his name. The rest of the night, he had let her sit a foot or so away from him, not touching, but close. She was kind, and quiet, and he … he was quiet, too.

He still feels a little drunk on it, buoyed by this improvement: he was able to control it, enough so that he recognized himself in the wolf. He’d engaged with her and still held a boundary, and they’d both woken up the next morning unscathed.

Now, he rests his chin on Vanessa’s shoulder as she hacks apart a side of beef with all the practiced concentration of a surgeon, and none of the grace. “You don’t need to do this,” he says, raising his head and taking a step back after her shoulder collides with his jaw from the force of her knifework. “I can cook well enough.”

“It’s not about _can_ ,” she says, her brow furrowing when she looks at him over her shoulder. “It’s about _want_ . I _want_ to be able to take care of you when you need it. God knows you’ve done it enough times for me. Besides, I like a challenge.”

There’s no arguing with Vanessa when she puts her mind to something, so he relents, perching on the counter while she reads instructions out of a recipe book that looks older than either of them. There’s something dissonant about seeing her move around a kitchen, like a panther tending a nursery, and it’s — well, he imagines it’s probably whatever Vanessa feels watching his wolf form plays with rope toys at the witching hour. 

“You make a good breakfast,” he offers, as she pinches her brow over the beef. “It is completely fine with me if you want to stick with that.”

“Nonsense,” says Vanessa briskly. The knife she’s using is larger than Ethan’s head. He thinks this is probably the closest he’s felt to being attracted to her, but even this feels more like pride in her ferocious commitment to doing something she’s inexperienced at than — that. “The least I can do is feed you. It was my idea to look into any of this.”

“Fair,” he allows, furrowing his brow as she starts chopping the meat. “Are you gonna marinate that?”

“Am I going to what?” she asks, lifting her head. 

_Jesus Christ_. “Okay, look,” he says, hopping off the counter and unbuttoning his cuffs. “Here. Can I — okay. Listen, Vanessa, I love you, but English food is — do you have oil? Where’s Sembene keep the spices? I’m not gonna take over, I just wanna — here. Okay. Put that in a bowl. Add some oil. And then — we’re gonna soak it for a couple hours. Trust me, all right? It’ll be good.”

She looks up at Ethan, a mischievous smile unfurling across her face. “All right, Mr. Chandler,” she says, a note of surprise warming her voice. “Show me how, then.”

“Seems like a ploy to get me to make my own supper,” he teases, and she probes gently at his side with the knife, the way a dog takes your hand in its mouth in a game of roughhousing — danger’s younger sister, playing at threat. 

“I’m a quick study,” Vanessa assures him, replacing the knife with her hand, and he pecks a kiss on her cheek and gets to stirring. She’s a careful listener, and after some introductory instruction he backs off, resuming his post on the counter and letting her muddle through with minimal guidance.

While the meat marinates and cooks, they sit across the kitchen table, Vanessa with a glass of brandy and Ethan with a whiskey, and they play increasingly unreasonably competitive games of Snap. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Vanessa laugh so much at something so frivolous, and he can feel himself falling deeper into whatever strange kind of love it is that he feels for her, like he’ll never want for anything else as long as he spends the rest of his life close in her orbit. For a brief moment, when she wraps her arms around his shoulders before checking on the meat, he thinks: _This is where I would kiss her_ , but — it doesn’t make sense when he looks back at her. It doesn’t make sense when he tries to apply it to _Vanessa_. 

The hug, though. That makes sense. When she comes back to the table, he grabs her gently around the waist and pulls her in, and she tenderly fusses with his hair for a moment before sitting back down. 

“Looking good?” he asks, and her eyes soften at him over her brandy.

“Indeed,” she says. “Though I’ll admit I don’t understand how you can eat it so bloody.”

“That’s the wolf, I assume.” He rocks his chair back on two legs and gives her a crooked smile. “Keep me around on the full moon and you won’t have to cook it at all.”

Vanessa makes a face. “Horrible,” she says, in her cracked, gravelly voice. “Will you suffer eating it cooked through for my sake?”

Ethan nods, mock-grave. “I’ll make the sacrifice, Miss Ives.”

“Good boy,” she says, shuffling the deck of playing cards, and Ethan’s chair thuds back to all fours as his mind short-circuits. “Another game?”

— 

Vanessa’s cooking improves slightly with Ethan’s guidance. Although the meat is too well-done, it’s flavorful, a welcome change from their usual English fare. Ethan puts away more than his fill, not only to sate himself, but also to show Vanessa that he’s appreciative of her efforts to care for him. 

He collapses on the parlor sofa beside her and groans contentedly. “I ate too much.”

He keeps his voice mild, conversational. He’s full enough to be a bit uncomfortable, to be sure. But he’s not _suffering_. If anything, it’s more of an acknowledgement that yes, he’s aware he ate more than might be considered normal, just to get a read on what Vanessa makes of it. He’s pretty sure she likes it, in the same unnameable way he does, but she’s tough to decode if she doesn’t want to be decoded. 

She tucks her legs beneath her on the sofa, the firelight flickering against her pale skin. “That seems to be happening rather a lot lately,” she says, prodding gently at his stomach where its bloat is muted by the bulk of his sweater.

It feels like the sort of thing he should be ashamed of, or miffed by, but her tone is so affectionate that he can’t bring himself to take offense. Besides, it’s not like he can argue. Lately, his appetite has remained voracious even without the full moon, though it’s not as dizzying as it is around a shift, and less urgent. This is lazier, more elective, eating because he enjoys it rather than because he’s afraid he’ll lash out if he doesn’t. Plus, it’s easier to enjoy it when his shame at the size of his appetite edges back every time she looks pleased that he’s eating, and not disgusted.

“Maybe I’m just getting comfortable,” he says, tucking his head against her shoulder. “What did you say when we started all this? That I should lean into it?”

Vanessa smiles, pinching one of his cheeks. “And do you feel better for it?”

He nods against her shoulder. It _has_ been an unexpected relief to give himself the freedom to indulge, even when his animal self doesn’t demand it, and the more he shifts with precautions in place, the more he starts to feel like he can lean in without losing himself. And the way Vanessa looks at him when he does — he wants to soak it in like the bits of cake she dips in milk at breakfast. 

“I do feel better,” he says, unsuccessfully stifling a hiccup as he shifts his weight on the sofa. The longer his supper settles, the more tightly packed he feels. “And fuller, Christ.”

“Should I rub your stomach?” she asks, raising an eyebrow, and he squints at her playfully. 

“What, like a dog?” he teases. “What are you trying to say, Miss Ives?”

“Well, you did respond very positively to dog toys,” she says primly, lifting her chin, and he laughs, big and open. “Besides, it helps stimulate digestion.”

He grins. As if he needs convincing to let Vanessa touch him. “Hard to argue that, I guess.” He shifts his weight again, and she watches him intently. “Well,” he adds generously, when she doesn’t move, “go ahead, if you’d like.”

Vanessa studies him for a moment. “Lift up your sweater,” she says finally, and he does, exposing the hard, round shape of his stomach. He’s always bloated now, it seems, as if his stomach doesn’t have time to recover from one meal to the next. It feels strange to say he doesn’t mind it, but more often, it just fills him with a comfortable kind of contentment.

The coolness of her hand seeps through the fabric of his undershirt, and he sighs a little at how welcome it feels against the warmth of his strained stomach. It lights up something inside him, comforting and thrilling all at once. “That’s real nice, Miss Ives,” he murmurs, and Vanessa gently pinches at his belly.

“Doesn’t it hurt, eating like this?”

“Nah,” he says, pushing his stomach toward her touch. He half-hopes, in a way he doesn’t know how to articulate, that she’ll praise him again. “It’s — hard to describe.”

“Try,” she says, pressing the heel of her hand into the lower curve of his stomach, and he makes a surprised little sound, half-gasp, half-belch, at the sudden pressure.

Vanessa’s eyebrows jump up. “Oh! I’m sorry,” she says, stumbling over it, and Ethan shakes his head, a bubbly, frictive fondness filling him up. 

“S’all right,” he manages, drawing in a breath. He can’t tell if he’s breathless from her stumbling, or from the overzealous amount of supper he ate. “Feels a little better now.”

Vanessa’s fingers spider over the dip of his navel, and the breath he took gets caught in his throat. “What does it feel like?”

He pushes out the breath around the weight in his stomach. “Soft,” he says slowly, tipping his head back. “A little like when you smoke. No edges on anything, no angles. That same heaviness. Easier to sleep afterward. It’s a strange little freedom, to be sure. But it beats starving.”

Vanessa listens, nodding along as he speaks. “And you like it,” she says, intrigued. Her pale eyes are trained on his, and he nods.

“I think you do, too.”

Color rises in Vanessa’s cheeks, and he grins. Uncertainty looks so sweet on her, so endearing, and it’s so rare to catch her in it. “You do, don’t you.”

She avoids his eyes. “I like knowing that you’re eating,” she says stiffly, kneading at the curve of his belly. “The first full moon we spent together — I practically had to beg you to eat. It’s good to see you taking care of yourself.”

All right, he thinks. He can live with that. Even if the way she cuts her eyes at him seems like there might be something more to it.

He can feel himself shaking slightly under her hands, not the same as when he’s anxious or restless before a shift, but a sort of quiet, lowercase trembling he can’t make sense of. It’s more in his hands when he’s anxious, he thinks, but this is up near his shoulders, an insistent awareness of his own energy. 

“Does that feel all right?” Vanessa asks, adding a little pressure to the circles she’s rubbing into his stomach, and he nods, catching a belch in his fist. Some of the tightness in his stomach eases, and he sighs, arching his hips toward her.

“Oh, yeah.” 

“Good, good,” Vanessa murmurs. Ethan’s stomach gurgles gratefully, and she laughs, covering her mouth with one hand.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking _almost_ contrite as she traces a circle around his navel. “It’s just that — you’re very _human_ like this, do you know that? I can’t think of anyone else I’ve seen quite as — as —”

“As what?” prompts Ethan playfully, digging an elbow into the sofa to straighten up a little. “As stuffed? As foolish? As gluttonous?”

“As exposed,” she says, holding his gaze. “In the past — when I’ve been — _intimate_ — there’s always a pretense, even when you’ve bared yourself fully, as it were. A desire to present yourself a certain way. To tuck in all of your ragged edges, to be seen as you wish you were. I don’t feel that pretense with you. I think that you let me see you as all that you are.”

His heart thumps in an echo, _in-ti-mate_. He wants to ask if that’s how she sees them. There isn’t a name for what he wants — he truly feels like Vanessa is a piece of him he only recently learned he’d been without, and everything had made that much more sense when he’d met her. Like he couldn’t be the best version of himself until she’d entered his life. Like he could trust her to take him as he was, without fear or hesitation.

Last month, Vanessa began to bleed as they slept, and he woke her, panicking, the metallic smell too strong and alarming for him to parse. Instead, she had cursed and rolled out of bed, muttering to herself, and he had watched, bleary-eyed and relieved, as she changed out the bedding, a red stain stark and spreading on her white nightgown. She had changed that last, sliding into bed beside him smelling of castile soap as she apologized sheepishly for waking and worrying him. As she settled back against his chest, he’d wondered at how many people had seen her in such a state, bloody and disheveled and annoyed, not because she was possessed and couldn’t help it but because she’d allowed them to see. Vanessa isn’t much for talking about her feelings, but in small ways, he thinks, she lets him know that she’s letting him see all that she is, too. 

It’s so strange. He’s seen Vanessa when she’s been the most and the least of herself, her power pulsing through every inch of her being, and yet the most foreign version of her is this mundane, cozy, day-to-day one. Perhaps that’s the most foreign version of him, too. It’s certainly taken him long enough to find it.

“Well, I hope you like what you see,” he says, stifling another belch. “This was your idea, remember.”

He makes sure she knows he’s teasing, and his heart prickles with pleasure when she laughs. “I don’t remember suggesting that you have four servings of supper,” she says, working her hand against a cramp in his stomach, and he makes a little whimper of a sound as the ache lessens. “But I must say, the rewards are delightful. It’s not very often that I feel confident in my cooking.”

Ethan laughs. “You did very well, Miss Ives. Please consider Exhibit A.” He jostles his stomach, then groans as its contents shifts uncomfortably. Vanessa pats its curve consolingly. 

“Your appetite is quite the endorsement,” she says, and a little wave of the same haze washes over Ethan. He wants that affirmation that he’s been good for her, wants to know that she’s pleased with him. 

He clears his throat. “I, uh — really liked it, before,” he says hesitantly. “When you said —”

Vanessa’s brows draw together, but her eyes ignite. “When I praised you.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” he says breathlessly. “I wouldn’t argue if you did that again.” 

She regards him for a long moment. “You enjoyed it?” she asks, and he nods vigorously.

She smooths his hair back from his face. “Good boy,” she whispers, the corners of her lips turning up as she cups his chin in her hand, and it irons him flat.

She keeps stroking his hair as he dozes, the crackle and murmur of the fireplace and the warm weight of his stomach lulling him off, but he perks a little when Vanessa shifts position beside him and punctuates the movement with a soft kiss to his forehead.

“Miss Ives?” he murmurs, and Vanessa tips her head toward him.

“Yes?”

He angles a sleepy, breathless grin at her. “I think you should cook more often.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "tender offerings," first aid kit


	9. strength

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "eric's song," vienna teng

Vanessa wakes up out of sorts, a dream of Mina washing out with the tide of her sleep. Her chest is a fist, her pulse a bruise, and she lies, staring, restlessness ebbing through her. Ethan’s arm is draped over her side, and she wriggles out from under it, her urgency hampering any gentleness. He sleeps on, the soft blush of his breath disturbing the hair at her neck, and she shudders, the sensation of any other person suddenly unbearable. She curls as close to the edge of the bed as she can, seeking the calming coolness of the sheets against her skin. 

She misses her own room, she realizes, despite the horrors it’s seen. There are plenty of nights when she happily falls asleep beside Ethan, curls into his embrace and welcomes the contact. But she misses the modicum of solitude that sleeping alone afforded her, the quiet ritual of praying alone, of brushing out her hair alone and unwinding her day in her head. It feels terribly selfish when Ethan is such an easy, affectionate bedfellow, when all he wants is to hold and protect her, keep her warm. 

Sleep shreds itself against the jagged edges of her mind. Perhaps she was made to hold others at arm’s length, she thinks bitterly. Would that her arms were longer.

In the morning, she still feels tangled, and she holds the dilemma in her head as she fans her cards out along her desk, ghosting her hand over them until one prickles at her fingertips. She turns it over and feels her shoulders tense: the Lovers.

“Not helpful,” she mutters, returning the card to the spread. She shuffles, splits the deck, shuffles again, fans the cards anew. She waits for one card to announce itself, then opens her eyes, cautious.

_ The Lovers _ . She catches her breath, traces the lines of the scorpion on the card. All right, she thinks, it could be figurative. The Lovers represent partnership, duality. Perhaps this is meant to be part of their strange union. 

“I think I’d like to sleep alone tonight,” she ventures at supper, after a day of mostly keeping to herself. She roamed Highgate Cemetery a while, the snowy air and timbre of nearby spirits easing some of the tension in her chest, and stopped to visit Mr. Clare, whose solitude always makes her a bit more grateful for someone to return home to. She feels — surer. A bit less tangled.

Now, Ethan looks up from his second helping of roast beef and potatoes to fix her with a puzzled gaze. “Sure,” he says. “Are you asking if that’s okay? You don’t need to ask me that.”

She doesn’t know what she’s asking for, exactly. Not permission, but — it’s more that she wants a read on how he’d feel about her deviation from the pattern they’ve fallen into. If he’ll be hurt by her stubborn need for independence and solitude, even in the face of his unending affection.

“Everything all right?” he asks a moment later, and she busies herself with her knife and fork.

“Yes, fine.”

“Just wanted to make sure I hadn’t done anything to upset you,” he says carefully, bringing his napkin to his lips. “You can tell me if I snore, Miss Ives. I won’t be offended.”

He smiles at her, open and waiting, and she lets herself give a tiny smile in return. 

“No, it isn’t you,” she says. “I simply need a bit of my own space. I’m not quite used to having someone around so often. It makes me a bit distant, I think.”

Ethan nods, but not unhappily. “I wondered. You’ve been, uh … hands-off, this week. Wasn’t sure if I’d offended you.”

She shakes her head. “No, never! I think I’m just used to being solitary.”

“I understand,” he says mildly. “Sleep alone all you like. You change your mind, you know where I am.”

There’s a way he could say it that would be scathing, but instead it’s even, inviting. Vanessa exhales. 

“You do hiccup in your sleep sometimes,” she teases after a moment, and Ethan goes red. “When you’ve eaten too much. It’s very sweet, don’t worry.”

“‘When I’ve eaten too much,’” Ethan repeats slowly, leaning back in his seat, a faint smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “So ...  _ every  _ night? Am I keeping you up, Miss Ives?”

She laughs, delighted by the amusement in his voice. The knot of apprehension in her chest unlaces itself. “No, of course not. You stop if I rub your back.”

He grins full-out. “Well,” he says, “I’ll await your return, but don’t cut your solitude short on my account. I might miss you, but I’ll be all right alone.”

For the better part of a week, they sleep in separate beds, and she waits for Ethan to realize that, for all they play at domesticity, she will never be his wife. That perhaps she is just some strange, crooked creature, unfit for company.  _ I love you _ , he’d said the other night while they were cooking, in such a casual, absent way that she knows it must be true. She holds on, fierce and clawed, to the hope that he wouldn’t give the words so easily if he meant to marry her.

But his realization doesn’t come. If anything, his joy at seeing her each morning is more palpable the longer she stays down the hall, and she finds that a pleasant thrill runs through her, too, as if her mind has managed to forget, overnight, that he’d still be here in the morning. 

She pulls a card. She pulls a card. She pulls a card.

The Lovers, the Lovers, the Lovers.

After several nights of solitude, she wakes in the night to find Ethan asleep in the chair at her vanity, his long legs sprawled out in front of him, a thick sweater pulled over his loose sleep shirt. 

“Ethan?” she asks, sitting up, and he starts, nearly losing his balance.

“Miss Ives,” he says huskily, stifling a yawn. “Hi there.”

“Are you all right?” she asks, her chest lacing tight with worry, and he nods, stretching his arms above his head. His sweater pulls up with the motion, revealing the round curve of his stomach pressing against his undershirt, and for a moment the air goes out of her at how soft he looks.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” he says sheepishly. “I heard you crying out, so I came to check, and I thought I’d wait a little and make sure you were all right. Was that — is it okay that I’m here? I know you want your space.”

The tightness in her chest burnishes itself into fondness, her heart swelling at how cautious he sounds. She doesn’t remember what she was dreaming of, or if it was distressing. A few months ago, when her dreams nearly always acted as omens, this would have upset her, but now it fades in the corona of his concern.

“Yes, it’s all right,” she says, shifting toward the left side of the bed. “Thank you, Mr. Chandler. That chair can’t be very comfortable. Would you like to spend the rest of the night here?”

She smoothes a hand over the empty side of the bed, and he meets her eyes, as if for permission. She nods, and he hauls himself up to settle beside her, the mattress dipping beneath his weight. 

“Do you want me to stay on my side?” he whispers, propping his head on his elbow. “I know I sleep, uh, …”

“Protectively?” she offers, teasing. “All-consumingly?”

His face scrunches into a sleepy smile. “I missed you,” he says, bunching himself up beneath the covers. “You sleep alone as much as you like, Miss Ives, but I’m down the hall whenever you want the company.”

Vanessa smiles back through the dark. “I missed your hiccups,” she whispers, and when Ethan reaches for her, she tucks herself against his chest and settles in.


	10. the hermit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "wolfman," the front bottoms (pun also intended)
> 
> cw: one character has a panic attack.

It’s been a long time since Ethan has considered buying new clothes. He likes his things to feel worn, lived-in, comfortable, and he’s cycled through the same scant collection of pieces for the past couple of years. He’s a fair hand at stitching — he can handle a simple patch job or a split seam. But as he gazes at the open waist of his trousers in the mirror, too much stomach sitting between the flaps of his fly to button them properly, he thinks maybe it might be time to make some changes.

It isn’t that he hasn’t noticed himself getting bigger. He’s kept the mirror in his room covered since the ordeal with the witches, wary that something dark might come through it, but the other day, Vanessa unsheathed it to fix her hair in the morning and he didn’t dissuade her. But even without his reflection, he can tell his body is changing by the way it feels — heavier, thicker, a bit more of him to maneuver than he’s used to. His vests feel more taxed when he exhales or bends forward now, his belly pressing at his shirt buttons. He’s been rationalizing it to himself for weeks — he’s eating more, sleeping more, spending more time on the sofa beside Vanessa than out stretching his legs. He’s — ahem — having fewer athletic encounters with enthusiastic locals with an appreciation for sharpshooting, and the leisurely walks he takes every other day probably aren’t enough to balance the recent bloat of his diet. These trousers used to be so roomy that he could tuck a bulky sweater in over his undershirt to keep out the London chill. But they’re snug around his hips now, the seams visibly struggling to contain him, and over the past week he’s begun to notice a tightness around the tops of his thighs that makes him a little wary of sitting down too recklessly. 

When he finally manages to get the pants done up, they squeeze him so uncomfortably that he worries that the slightest movement might pop the buttons off altogether. He exhales carefully, the waistband digging into the soft give of his stomach. Today, he slept in so late that it was nearly noon by the time he hauled himself out of bed, and then he ate enough to count for breakfast  _ and  _ dinner before dozing off beside Vanessa on the sofa. Just now, he washed up and decided to get dressed for the day even though the clock is edging toward four, just to feel like he hasn’t fallen  _ completely  _ into abject laziness. So it really  _ isn’t  _ a surprise that he’s getting thicker. But it does surprise him that his immediate reaction isn’t panic or disgust, but curiosity. He’s never held much extra weight, and he prods at his stomach through his shirt, marveling at the way it squishes under his hands. 

Carefully, he undoes his pants, pulling his stomach in as he nudges the buttons through the buttonholes. The buttons of his shirt are pulled taut, puckering the cotton, and when he rucks it up to examine the undershirt beneath, there’s a strange satisfaction that builds in the pit of his stomach at seeing how his midsection bows out, soft and pudgy, under the thin fabric. He no longer looks like the hollow, haunted man who runs at the first sign of danger. That man is gone, built on and sown over, a new trunk growing thick and strong in his place. 

He should feel guilty, he thinks, smoothing a hand over the new bulge of his waist. He’s fallen out of shape so badly he can’t fit into his clothes. He’s let his days become so full and indolent that his appetite feels permanently swollen. He tries to summon some shame, grabbing a handful of his stomach in the mirror, measuring the width of his hips between his hands, but nothing curdles in his chest. He would have felt properly guilty about this a few months ago, he thinks. Taking up space at Grandage Place, eating so much without contributing in return beyond some light housework and a finger on a trigger. He’d never have gotten away with this kind of laziness then. It should spook him, that his loss of control is such that he can’t even pinpoint the moment when he stopped thinking about indulging Vanessa and started indulging himself.

“Are you becoming vain?” comes Vanessa’s voice, teasing, as she steps into the room. He quits his preening, startled, the cool shadow of doubt falling over his shoulders like a cold night creeping in on the heels of the desert heat as he hurriedly tries and fails to button his pants again. He’s never been particularly vain, and he worries about his appearance even less with Vanessa, but — keeping his hair a certain way is a different animal than being unable to button his pants without a fight. 

She’s watching from the doorway, arms folded over her black bodice. “We’ve a letter from Mr. Lyle; he’s heading to Egypt on some sort of archaeological dig. He invited you along, but I think it’s mostly in jest. Tea is ready, if you’d like some. Unless you’d prefer it in front of the mirror?”

He catches her reflection’s eye. That animal thing is back in her eyes, a sharp flash of interest, and he puzzles at it. He knows Vanessa cleaves to fashion, laces her own corset every morning despite the slimness of her figure. He’s seen the small amounts she eats, her general indifference to indulgence for her own sake. But — she’s always encouraging, pushing him toward another plate, a treat for dessert, a confection she chose from the bakery. It’s her hand on his stomach when he overdoes it, her fingers carding through his hair when he’s dozing in her lap.  _ Not  _ that he’s complaining. He’ll let Vanessa feed him the rest of his natural life if she wants to.

Which makes it a lot easier to say, “Can I ask you something?”

She sweeps into the room and settles on the edge of his bed. “Of course.”

He grounds his hands on his hips and sets to pacing in front of her, the narrow space between the bed and the windows making for a tight path. “Do I look a little different to you, Miss Ives?”

Vanessa’s face is the picture of innocence, which is how he knows the answer is  _ yes _ . “Aside from your state of partial undress?” she asks, nodding toward his undone trousers, and he almost smiles in spite of himself. 

“Aw, don’t play with me now,” he says, though it comes out more fond than exasperated. “I do, don’t I?”

Vanessa takes a deep breath. “You do, and I’m very fond of it. Are you?”

Ethan exhales in a rush. “Yeah,” he says gruffly, sinking down beside her. “I am, but I can’t figure why.”

He sits heavily on the bed and Vanessa follows, placing one of her hands on his thigh. “May I tell you why I like it?” she asks, and he nods. He can feel the slight dip of the softness beneath his chin as he moves.

“You look so well-fed,” she says, and the words fall off her like meat from the bone. She lays her palm across his stomach, spreading her fingers to cover as much as possible. “Look at you, Ethan. So healthy, so … satiated. Three months ago I could see your ribs when you shifted.” 

She prods at his sides, and he grunts softly at how much they squish beneath her hands. There’s something about the way those sentiments sound in Vanessa’s low, hoarse voice that undoes him a little, to be their object. 

“I can’t see them anymore,” she continues, gently pinching his belly, and his eyes flutter shut at how affectionate it feels. “And your face — your cheeks, they’re so round. They look so sweet, and especially when you smile. You look so content.” She spreads her palm over his stomach. “Domesticated, even.”

Ethan goes still. There’s a cold splash in his stomach, the strike of flint against fear. There’s something unsafe about the word, airless in a way he can’t quite articulate. But he can’t figure out  _ why _ , when he spends so much of his time cooking with Vanessa, reading on the sofa with her tucked beside him, letting her feed him and pet his hair. Isn’t that domesticity? Why does it feel so  _ uncomfortable _ to call it that?

“Ethan,” says Vanessa, like she’s underwater. “What is it? Did I say something — untoward?”

He pulls himself off the bed and back into pacing, unable to look at her. He can’t — they don’t fit in the image, he thinks. Maybe that’s it. He can’t make it square in his mind between the two of them. He has to imagine domesticity is as foreign to Vanessa, a wild thing disguised by corsets and frocks, as he is. He’s afraid of it, of all its little breakable pieces, the way it feels like it’ll shatter around him if he gets too comfortable. It’s too small, too cramped for a man who only recently learned that he has a strange second body he doesn’t understand, except for how to soothe it with food. Too small and cramped for a man who, in soothing his strange new body, has only made himself larger.

“Ethan,” says Vanessa again, more urgently, and he stops, the room vaguely unsteady around him. He realizes his chest is heaving, that his hands are planted on his hips, and he sinks shakily back onto the bed. He wants her to touch him so badly, wants the reassurance of her affection, but he doesn’t know how to ask, can’t bring himself to. 

“What is it?” she asks, and he curls in on himself.

“I don’t know,” he chokes. “I don’t know.”

She takes both of his wrists in her hands, her grip echoing the irons from the cellar, and instantly he feels his breathing start to even. “It’s all right,” she murmurs. “I have you. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“Not you,” he manages. “Just — it didn’t feel right. ‘Domesticated.’ I don’t know. I’m not made for that.”

Vanessa makes a commiseratory sound in the back of her throat. “Well, I hardly am either. It’s no wonder we get on.”

The gravity in her voice undercuts the lightness of her words, and he sags against her, his head on her shoulder. His wrists are still clasped in her hands, and he focuses on the pressure as he works to bring himself back down. He can feel his pulse pounding beneath Vanessa’s grip, and gradually it slows until he can breathe again. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and she shakes her head against him. “I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t breathe, all of a sudden.”

“It’s all right,” she says softly. “It frightens me sometimes too, being comfortable. Sometimes it’s more difficult to accept happiness than it is to suffer, is it not? Or — perhaps not to accept it, but to accept that you might deserve it.”

He nods, and she works her fingers through his hair, keeping one hand at his wrist. “Come downstairs,” she coaxes after a few moments. “We’ll have tea, and I’ll make you something to eat. You’ll feel better.”

“Not sure if I need anything else to eat,” he says wryly, thumbing at the open waistband of his trousers, but Vanessa shakes her head.

“Nonsense. What you need are new trousers. You still need to eat. There’s a full moon coming.”

“Not for a week,” he reminds her, and she gives his temple a slow, lingering kiss that seems to suck all the remaining tension out of him. 

“I meant what I said, about liking to see you well-fed.” She lays a hand on his belly. “Will you indulge me? I’m quite new at taking care of people.”

He smiles at her weakly, the words warming something in the pit of his stomach. Framed that way, it feels fine _ , good  _ even — he likes taking care of Vanessa, cooking for her and brushing her hair and surprising her with clean laundry or a scoured study, bringing her fresh tea or carrying her to bed when she falls asleep downstairs. The other day, he presented her with a basket of the rags she uses when she bleeds, freshly washed, and her delight so delighted  _ him  _ that he’d had the strange urge to turn in circles to burn off the surge of happy energy. And he’s learning, the more he lets himself be cared for, too, that it makes him go soft and pliant inside. He’s never allowed himself to accept that kind of tenderness before, and it’s the closest he’s come to being able to convince himself he might not be something monstrous after all. But that’s the thing. It  _ feels  _ great. It’s just — he can’t think about it like some permanent state he exists in. An act exchanged between him and Vanessa, fine. But not a way of  _ being _ . 

But there’s something in him aching to be soothed, and he knows a little doting will do the trick, if he lets Vanessa fuss over him, brush a few bites of food against his lips. Nothing sounds better right now than to press himself close to her and inhale her sharp, sweet smell, and let her make the decisions for a while.

Maybe it’s closer to indulging himself than it is to indulging her. But understanding that he needs it makes him feel like he’s regained a little of the control he feared he’d lost.

“All right,” he tells her, and the world steadies a little further.


	11. the wheel of fortune

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "friday i'm in love," phoebe bridgers

Vanessa slips the measuring tape around Ethan’s waist and makes a note of the number. “It’s a miracle you’re still wearing these,” she remarks, working a finger between his undershirt and the taxed, tight waistband of his trousers. It makes something wild flutter in her stomach, how much he’s softened, and she pats the curve of his stomach. 

He whines gently, and she shows him the number. “You’ve gained several centimeters in your waist, as well as in your hips and your backside,” she says, trying her damnedest to keep her voice carefully even and composed.

Ethan grins and holds out an arm for her to measure. “You say that like you’re not partially responsible.”

Vanessa freezes. “What do you mean?” she asks, though she’s sure she knows.

Ethan gives her a knowing look. “Come on, you’re always feeding me. Touching my stomach, giving me that little look …”

Vanessa’s face goes so hot she thinks she could toast bread over it. “I like seeing you well-fed,” she mumbles, and Ethan nudges her until she looks at him.

“You keep saying that. I’m not gonna cut and run if you say you like me a little chubby.”

Her hands go loose around the tape measure, and she fumbles it so badly that she drops it. Ethan gives her a devastatingly deliberate look.

“If I pick that up,” he says, holding her gaze, “I stand a real good chance of busting these pants. Do you wanna see that, Miss Ives?”

Vanessa is having an extraordinarily difficult time breathing. “I’ll pick it up,” she grinds out.

She retrieves the tape measure where it’s rolled across the floor. They’re in Ethan’s room, afternoon sun bearing down on her, and if she can get through this without combusting, perhaps they’ll go shopping later on for some new things. 

Ethan hasn’t made any other mention of their conversation about domesticity the other day, though he spent the next day or two in a quiet funk that Vanessa tried to combat by holding him, praising him, being gentle with him. Yesterday and today he’s seemed lighter, more himself, and now — well, now his spirits seem to be plenty high. 

When she turns back to Ethan, heat still high in her cheeks, he’s waiting with his hands on his hips. He’s just in an undershirt, to give them the most accurate numbers on his expanding waistline. His stomach spills out from the open fly of his trousers, his suspenders hanging loose at his sides. “Couldn’t keep ’em done up,” he says, eyeing her. “Too tight.”

“Well, I don’t doubt that,” she says, and she decides: if he’s going to play dirty, so is she. “You’ve been eating like you’re trying to outgrow them.”

Ethan swallows audibly, and for a moment she worries that she’s overstepped. But then he grins, broad and delighted. “Oh, so that’s how it is,” he says. “You like that, Miss Ives?”

She hugs herself, trying to organize the sensation into words. “All right,” she says finally. “I do like you” — she trips over the words — “a little chubby. Or quite a bit, as it were. I don’t know what it is. It’s not — normal, the way it makes me feel. It’s quite confusing.”

Ethan scoffs. “Like we’ve ever been a normal couple of people, Miss Ives. What do you mean, it’s confusing?”

She hugs herself tighter, and he slides his arms around her, the curve of his stomach fitting into the small of her back. “It’s strange,” she says slowly, steadied by his embrace. “I like the way you look like this, certainly. That isn’t confusing, or abnormal. You’re so — soft, and plump, and yielding. But I also like — when you eat. Your appetite. The way you look and sound when you’ve eaten too much, or the way your clothes look when they get snug. It feels — odd. It’s not attraction, or at least not by the conventional definition. But it makes me feel — something. Satisfied, or gratified, I’m not sure. _That’s_ what’s confusing.”

She doesn’t feel as if she’s done well expressing herself, but she also feels a bit like she’s being cooked as he _hmm_ s in her ear. 

“Knew a gal back in America who liked to be blindfolded,” he says. “Know a gentleman here who likes to be photographed _in flagrante delicto_.”

He drops his voice and overenunciates the Latin, and Vanessa laughs unexpectedly. Ethan’s arms tighten around her. “I believe I know that gentleman as well,” she says, and she feels him nod.

“Everyone’s got their little things,” he says. “Well — not everyone. But enough that you don’t need to feel strange about it. And especially not with me. Not when I’ve got a little thing for the way you encourage me.”

“Oh, you do like that!” she exclaims, turning to face him. “It’s difficult to know what might seem — untoward.”

“Nah, I like it,” he confirms, grinning. “I like the way you tease me, too. And that voice you do when you take charge.” He kisses her hair. “Also? Those knots you tie. Got a thing for that.”

“But —” says Vanessa, and then swallows it, unable to find her words. Ethan waits, and she finally manages, “It isn’t _sexual_. I don’t want to — I don’t want you to think — this is why it’s confusing, you understand.”

“Sometimes it isn’t,” says Ethan, unfussed. “The food stuff we do — it’s not really like that for me, either. But I enjoy it. It feels good. When you tell me I’m good, it wakes up _something_ in me, but it’s not that. Just a different kind of satisfaction, I suppose. Or relief, maybe. Like an exhale.”

Vanessa lets out a breath. “All right,” she says, feeling as if she’s gaining a bit of her footing back. “Then I suppose if we both enjoy it, we needn’t keep talking around it.”

“Talking around it!” says Ethan, grinning. “You offered to rub my stomach the other night. I thought you were putting it out in the open. Your subtlety needs a little practice, Miss Ives.”

“ _My_ subtlety!” says Vanessa, emboldened. “May I remind you of the way you push your stomach into my hand every time you overeat?”

She loops the tape measure around his waist, and he takes a step toward her, just until the roundest part of his stomach touches the rigid corsetry of her bodice. “Should I stop?” he asks. “I _am_ getting pretty chubby, huh? All that food you keep pushing on me.”

Vanessa tips her chin up to meet his eyes. They’re soft, encouraging, inviting her to engage. “I don’t think you _could_ stop,” she says softly, slipping the measuring tape into the back pocket of his trousers. It’s a tight fit. “Your appetite is too insatiable now.”

It feels like plunging into the cold ocean on a summer day, the freezing surf immobilizing and liberating all at once. She thrashes for purchase and finds it in Ethan’s grin. “No wonder your clothes can barely hold you,” she says, spidering her hands down the round swells of his hips and toying with his suspenders. “You must have had to adjust these?”

“A couple times now,” he says, cradling his stomach in his hands. “They got so snug I could barely move with ’em.”

She lays her hand on the curve of his belly, spreading her palm over the widening dip of his navel and then using its indentation as a handhold to grab at a handful of his stomach. “Look at you,” she murmurs. “You’re overflowing, you’ve gotten so plump. You’ll split your seams soon if you aren’t careful.” 

They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then Vanessa laughs, a little nervously. “It feels very deviant to tease you like this,” she admits. “In such a — _mundane_ sort of way.”

“I like a little teasing,” he admits. “If it’s affectionate. Makes me feel — known, I guess. Safe enough to mess around a little, you know? And I know I’m in good hands with you.”

He pulls her down on the bed beside him, and she goes willingly, following suit when he flops onto his back. She settles herself so that she’s resting on one elbow, her free hand playing with the underside of his stomach, testing the way it jiggles. 

Ethan is watching her with a fond smile on his face, the softness below his chin doubling. “I gotta say,” he muses, “I think you had a point about liberating ourselves by leaning into our animal appetites.”

He smirks, and Vanessa pinches his belly. “Leaning into _your_ animal appetites, you mean.”

“Oh, like you’re not a little feral,” he says, pulling her on top of him. “I don’t think it’s bad. I love it, to be honest. You’re a little feral. So am I. Like meeting like.”

“The Lovers,” murmurs Vanessa, her pulse ticking up, and Ethan freezes beneath her.

“What’s that, now?”

“The card,” she says quickly. “When I met you, I had you draw a card, and you chose the Lovers. At the time I thought it referred to whatever you were running from, and the life you were pursuing here. And then I thought maybe it meant your duality of man and beast.” She pauses, biting her lip, and Ethan takes her hand gently.

“But now …?”

“But now I wonder if it’s all those things, and … us,” she says haltingly. “It keeps showing up in my readings, and … The Lovers doesn’t necessarily refer to any kind of — it can be any partnership, any duality. It’s the unity of two separate forces. Internal, external. Man, beast.” She smiles wryly. “Witch, wolf.”

“The Lovers,” Ethan repeats, kissing her forehead for a long moment, and she’s sure he can feel the hammer of her heartbeat through her dress. “I can see it,” he says finally. “I think we’re a pretty bulletproof pair, don’t you, Miss Ives?”

“High praise from a sharpshooter,” she observes, dipping in to kiss his temple, soft and long. She smoothes her hand over his stomach again, tracing the curves of his sides. “But yes, I do.”

She doesn’t have words for how badly she wants it, or how deeply she believes it. But if they can make this strange, exciting thing between them work without sex, or without even applying any kind of name to what they are, maybe they _are_ bulletproof.

He rolls on top of her and lingers a moment before kissing her forehead again, and she struggles to catch her breath. She’s used to Ethan’s weight moving beside her in bed, the general size and bulk of him. Sometimes he rolls half on top of her in the night and she’s too comfortable to push him off, and sometimes she takes comfort in the security of him pinning her down. But it’s different now that they’ve _talked_ about it, feeling his full weight bear down on her and knowing that not only is it partly her doing, but that he enjoys it as much as she does. 

“You’re very heavy,” she manages, the strain in her voice palpable.

“Am I hurting you?” he asks, making to roll off, and she shakes her head, bracing her hands around the curves of his sides. 

“No, but you’ll need to get up if you want me to finish measuring you.” She strokes his hair out of his face, kissing his jaw. “Perhaps I could buy you supper while we’re out? We should have plenty of time before the moon rises if we leave soon.”

He tips himself off her and props himself on an elbow, the swell of his stomach bumping up against her hip. “You want me to eat supper in these pants? I don’t know if they’ll survive.”

Maybe it’s the revelation that all of her strange feelings aren’t quite as strange as she’d thought, or the realization that those feelings aren’t just _hers_. But there’s a rush of exhilaration, the pure thrill of unreluctant desire, when she realizes she no longer has to pretend the question doesn’t wake something wild in her.

“What better way to justify buying new ones?” she teases, shifting to face him and running her hand from the crest of his shoulder through the shallow valley of his sides, back up the hill of his hip. “We could pick up something to bring home for dessert, if you’re still hungry.”

“Oh, you know I will be,” he says, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Might have to take a carriage back, though, if you’re planning to feed me like you usually do.” 

“Oh, of course,” she agrees. She grins at him and pats at the pudgy curve of his hip. “Come on, up. Let’s see about your chest and arms before we go. You’re getting chubby there, too.”

Ethan pulls himself up to a sit, and Vanessa follows, admiring the pull of his undershirt across his broad shoulders, the width of his softening back. “Christ, these are tight,” he says, and no sooner has he braced his hands on his thighs to stand up than there’s the sharp sound of fabric rending. 

They both freeze. Ethan is bright red, his eyebrows near his hairline, and Vanessa checks to make sure she hasn’t bitten through her lip. 

“Another pair of trousers, then,” she says, her voice so mortifyingly deep with surprise and fluster that she feels her shock giving way to laughter. “And perhaps we should also measure your thighs.”

It’s difficult to hold it together at dinner, ordering a few entrees and then watching Ethan eat steadily and enthusiastically, as if they aren’t sitting in a restaurant surrounded by other people. She takes small bites of everything they’ve ordered, while Ethan eats the rest. Each time, he reaches with his fork and meets her eyes meaningfully before asking, “Are you gonna finish that?” Each time, Vanessa grips her own knife and fork a little more tightly, until she thinks she might bend the metal. There’s something about the two of them playing at it together, a tight little spotlight of a game illuminating all the dark parts of herself she’s never gotten to explore, that makes a bright, unnameable tension rise in her chest.

She sips at her brandy, trying to calm it, until Ethan sets down his utensils and brings his napkin to his lips, reclining in his seat. His vest is puckered around its buttons, stretched over his thick sides, and he looks thoroughly sated, luscious. He’ll sleep well tonight, she thinks. It’s a good thing that all the knots on his harness are adjustable. 

“Did you have enough?” she asks, wondering if the people around them have noticed the unusual amount of dishes on their table, the ritual of their uneven sharing. They’ve both dressed up a bit for a night out, and she loves the way Ethan looks, packed tightly into his proper attire, bulging at the seams, and she loves the knowledge that perhaps they do seem strange amid everyone else, because they _are_. 

Ethan sighs into the crisp burgundy cloth, closing his eyes contentedly. “Probably a bit too much, but everything’s so good. So rich.”

She has to agree — everything they’ve ordered has been decadent, buttery, drenched in cream sauce or wine, heavy and indulgent, and she can see in his half-mast eyelids that it’s starting to take its toll on him. They’ve just finished dessert, fluffy slices of Genoese sponge cake layered generously with buttercream, and Ethan sips his coffee with one hand on his stomach. She can hear his shallow breaths across the table, but when she meets his eyes over her glass of brandy, he smiles at her, a soft, languid thing as sweet as the buttercream she can taste on the back of her tongue.

He cradles his stomach on the ride home, each jostle of the carriage making him wince and hiccup, and Vanessa pushes herself close to him, rubbing comforting circles over the straining buttons on his waistcoat. Several sets of new clothes sit in boxes on the other side of the carriage, though Vanessa will miss seeing the pull of his shirts around his belly, the snugness of his trousers trying to contain his plump hips. Though, she thinks, at the rate that he eats, perhaps she’ll have the thrill of seeing him fill out these new clothes all over again.

His coat is open, and gently, she unbuttons his taxed vest, looking to him for permission first. He nods, and she eases them through their buttonholes, jerking her hands away when the motion of the carriage knocks a loud belch out of him. 

“Christ, sorry,” he murmurs, brushing the back of his hand against his mouth. She pets his hair soothingly, and with her other hand she hovers over the waistband of his trousers. It’s biting into his stomach, constricting in a way she can’t imagine is comfortable, but offering to undo _those_ buttons feels too suggestive.

Instead, she thumbs at it and asks, “Would you be more comfortable if these were undone? They feel awfully tight.”

He perks up enough to angle a sly look at her. “Look at you, Miss Ives,” he says, mock-scandalized. “And in _public_!”

Vanessa’s cheeks blaze with heat. “We’re not in _public_. And your waistband is about to slice you in half.”

“If I exhale, there’s a good chance the buttons won’t be a problem,” he says, shooting her a mischievous grin, and she hides her face in his shoulder. “But if you’d rather I let it all hang out — oh, what’s that, Miss Ives? You a little shy about that? You weren’t too shy when you were sitting across from me ordering all those entrees just now. Making that little face that says you want me to ask for permission.”

Flames fan up in her belly, and she bites at his shoulder gently through his coat, something akin to electricity charging up through her shoulders and hands. “I thought you liked that, Mr. Chandler. You have a little look, too, you know. When I _do_ give you permission. Your eyes soften and your shoulders drop. This little — euphoria — comes over you. It certainly _looks_ like you like it.”

“Oh, I like it,” says Ethan with feeling, turning to kiss her forehead. He hiccups as the carriage hits another bump, and she returns her hand to his belly, resting her chin on his shoulder. “I just think it’s cute when you get all flustered.” He winks at her. “Seems fair when you get to see me so full I can barely breathe.”

“You think it’s _cute_?” she asks, confused. It doesn’t seem particularly sharp or clever of her to like giving him her permission, but perhaps he thinks she’s playing at the game, still? Acting flustered to gain a certain response? 

Ethan belches gently behind his hand and shrugs. “Yeah, it’s sweet. Makes me wanna hug you.”

Vanessa feels her brow furrow. “Does the word _cute_ mean something different in America?”

He crosses his arms gingerly over his belly. “We would say that a pretty girl might be cute. Or a — a baby, I guess. Something you find endearing. Not the case here?”

Her heartbeat skips at _pretty girl_ , but she hangs onto the fact that he said _hug_ , not _kiss_ , and shakes her head. “It means _clever_ , or _shrewd_. Certainly not ‘it makes me smile to see you flustered.’”

“Well, I think you’re very cute, Miss Ives,” he says, wrapping his arm around her. “Both ways.”

“As are you, Mr. Chandler,” she says smoothly, kissing his cheek. “Now, are you going to liberate yourself from your waistband, or would you like me to do it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the phrase "the pure thrill of unreluctant desire" is an allusion to marie howe's poem [”practicing”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54778/practicing)!


	12. justice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "guilt," radical face

It shocks him a little, how much it changes to talk about that strange energy between them, their mutual investment in his appetite, his figure. It frees something up between them, and Ethan is delighted by how much freer Vanessa, in particular, seems with it out in the open. He wakes up with her draped against his back, one hand hanging over his side to clutch a handful of his stomach. He learns that she gets a little thrill out of talking about his weight in casual, offhand remarks — _ I think you’re a bit too plump for that jacket, Mr. Chandler _ ;  _ you’ll need to get that yourself, you’re a bit too heavy for me to get out from under you _ — and it thrills him, too, weird and profoundly comforting. Her attention, her attentiveness, makes him feel known in a deep, secret sort of way. He could never imagine talking like this with anyone but Vanessa, or imagine anyone else knowing just how to tease him so affectionately. 

The next month passes in a cozy haze of food and soft touches and sleep. They take long walks every day or two, arm in arm or sometimes hand in hand, and she touches him more freely, pinching his cheeks fondly and running her hands over the swells of his sides, the curve of his belly. He wakes when she stirs in the night and he never thought it could settle him so much, watching someone fall back to sleep. 

The first night of the full moon, Vanessa brings several slabs of raw meat into the cellar and makes him wait before he can touch them. He guesses it would be more difficult if he were starving rather than stuffed full of roast chicken, but he finds that he’s able to keep his attention on Vanessa and her commands, rather than the food in front of him. After she lets him eat, he approaches her cautiously, touching his nose to her palm, and when he steps too far and the harness strains against his shoulders, she comes to sit in the center of the floor with him. He doesn’t remember the decision not to hurt her, but he’s sure of his own confidence that she’s a friend and not a threat. 

Vanessa is delighted over breakfast the next morning. “You let me touch you,” she says as they move around each other making hotcakes. “You touched your nose to my palm, and allowed me to pet your head and your ears. Do you remember?”

Ethan remembers. It barely takes more effort now than to remember what happened yesterday. He isn’t quite sure when that happened, but he suspects it has something to do with the fact that he’s no longer doing everything in his power to separate himself from his wolf form. They’re one queer hybrid creature now, and they’re in it together, and the more he remembers the more he can see himself in it: his caution, his brashness, his heart.

The next night, Ethan follows Vanessa down to the cellar, and when she picks up the rope harness to help him into it, he hesitates.

He takes a deep breath. “I’d like to try something tonight,” he says, and Vanessa’s eyes leap to his. 

“Yes?”

His shoulders pull up in apprehension, and Vanessa takes his hands before he can start to fidget. “I’m still gonna stay in the basement,” he says, and it feels like each word costs him something to say aloud. “But I don’t — don’t tie me up unless you have to, all right? We’ll see how I do.”

“Mr. Chandler,” says Vanessa, intrigued. “Are you sure?”

“No,” he admits. Even though Vanessa has reported nothing but good behavior over the past couple of moons, he can’t shake his natural dread from the well deep within his bones. “But I trust your instincts. And I — I want to know if I can do it.”

Five months ago, he’d accepted that for a few nights every month, for the rest of his godforsaken life, chaining himself up in the cellar was the best he could hope for. It was a small price to pay for being a monster, for preventing himself from committing even more senseless violence. He’d thought that if he was lucky, at least his life wouldn’t be very long.

But now, he spends his evenings in front of the fire with Vanessa, or in bed beside Vanessa, or walking home from supper or the theater or a late-night stroll with Vanessa, and he’s starting to understand that what he thought was his best-case scenario may have just been a baseline for survival. He’s starting to feel like maybe he  _ isn’t  _ a monster, but every night that he wriggles into that rope harness knocks him two steps backward in believing it.

Vanessa doesn’t think it will be the end of the world if he shifts freely, and against everything he’s ever believed himself to be, he’s starting to hope that she’s right.

Now, she tips his chin up so that his eyes meet hers. “If you’re not comfortable,” she says firmly, “we don’t need to try anything. I don’t believe that you pose a threat to me, but I won’t go against your wishes if you’d rather be restrained.”

Ethan shakes his head. “No. I need to do it before I lose my nerve.” He huffs out a harsh breath. “If I come for you, if it even  _ looks  _ like I’m going to, I want you upstairs, you hear me? Don’t take your chances. Don’t get brave. Shut me in, lock me in —”

Vanessa is making that face that says she knows he’s serious and respects that, but also fails to see how she’s threatened at all. “If I feel that I’m in danger,” she says calmly, “I’ll go upstairs.”

“Can you —” he starts, then trails off, hanging his head. “Can you hold onto my wrists? Just for a minute. Until I change. I didn’t realize I’d gotten used to it.”

“Of course,” she says. He holds out his hands to her, and she circles his wrists in her slim fingers. It makes something go soft inside him — entrusting himself to Vanessa, willingly placing himself in her care. Her hands are firm against his skin, an anchor, and as the first violent shudder travels through him, his last coherent human thought is of how much less  _ traumatic  _ the shift is with someone by his side.

When he wakes up the next morning, Vanessa is asleep in her chair a foot or so away, a pillow shoved between her head and the stone wall. The blanket he’s nestled in is one of the ones she’s been sleeping with as the moon waxes, hoping to acclimate him to her scent so he’ll associate it with comfort. Satisfied that it seems to have worked, he reaches for his shirt and wriggles into it. It falls loosely over the soft mound of belly in his lap, and he leaves his pants unbuttoned when he slips them back on, last night’s bloat still firm around his waist. He tugs on the sweater he’d been wearing last night, its bulk hiding his undone waistband, and settles back beside her to run over the night in his head. 

Vanessa left him in the cellar while she went back up to the kitchen, and when she returned, she laid an apple, a marrow bone, and some raw pork on the floor in front of him. 

“Don’t touch those,” she said, and although he remembers the fresh, intoxicating smell of the meat, and the temptation pulling him toward it all, everything is still just as she laid it out now. A little surge of pride travels through him. He remembers being able to choose not to touch it, and being able to keep that impulse in check. He’s reasonably sure that if he shifted around another person, he would be able to leave them alone. It unburdens something in his chest so substantially that even with his extra weight, he feels lighter than he has in months.

She wakes beside him with a start, and he puts a gentle hand on her knee to steady her. “Morning, Miss Ives,” he says, kissing her hand, and she tousles his hair.

“Good morning. I see you haven’t touched anything I gave you last night.”

He looks up at her, shakes his head. “Good boy,” she murmurs, tucking his hair behind his ears, and he scoots closer to her chair, warmth filling up his stomach. 

“You must be popular over at the butcher’s these days,” he says, and she laughs. “We’re probably single-handedly keeping him afloat.”

She tips his head into her lap and keeps her hands in his hair, and he sighs at the effect it has, a tingling calmness spreading through him. “Well, we need to keep you fed somehow,” she says. “Come along. Would you like breakfast? I picked up some cake yesterday while I was out. Or, I think, there might still be hotcakes from yesterday morning.” 

“There aren’t,” says Ethan, resting a hand on his belly. “I ate them after supper last night.”

She shoots a half-amused, half-intense look at him. “After dessert, you mean.”

He closes his eyes, letting an easy, sleepy smile spread across his face. “I get hungry, Miss Ives, sometimes I need a little something extra.”

Vanessa shakes her head, her sharp, arch smile showing all her teeth. “I’m well aware, Mr. Chandler,” she says, standing and stretching before offering him a hand up. “Come upstairs. There’s plenty more for you.”

He lets her help him up and pulls her into a hug, resting his chin on top of her head. She tucks her face against his neck, her arms snug and comforting around his waist, and he feels all the stiffness his body gathered sleeping on the stone floor melt away under her touch. He’s never quite sure if it’s a psychosomatic symptom of being close to her, or if her abilities actually allow her to leach the discomfort from his body, but he’ll take it either way.

“You gonna have a piece of cake with me?” he asks, dropping a kiss on the crown of her head. 

She pulls away just enough to smile up at him. “Of course. Someone has to keep you from eating the whole thing yourself.”

The words tip up playfully, and he grins, touches his forehead to hers. “Aw, I’ll always save you some,” he says, the tip of his nose brushing hers. “I don’t enjoy these things half as much without you.”

He thinks again: this is where he’d kiss her, if she were anyone but Vanessa. But she  _ is  _ Vanessa, and somehow it feels like more than he’s ever dared to dream of with just her arms around his waist, her brow against his, the lingering timbre of her voice in his ears. 

“Come on,” he says, herding her toward the stairs, his hand on her waist this time, the way she taught him to dance. “Let’s go eat.”


	13. the hanged man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "the harrowed and the haunted," the decemberists

Ethan falls asleep next to her on the sofa after supper, his stomach full of pasta Vanessa somehow overboiled, despite keeping a hawk’s eye on it. Ethan volunteered to make the sauce, so the meal was still delicious, but she’s a bit out of sorts about the noodles. 

She’s felt strange this week, the way she normally does the week before she bleeds, but that was  _ last  _ week, so she’s not quite sure what the trigger is. Everything seems just a bit more difficult — or not even that, just  _ annoying _ — and she finds herself getting unreasonably frustrated at the smallest things: the splashes of water Ethan drips back to his room when he washes his hair, getting her eggs slightly wrong in the morning, not being able to figure out the killer in the mystery she’s reading, and now the pasta. She feels — prickly. Like if Ethan isn’t careful, he’ll roll on top of her in the night, and she’ll draw blood.

Ethan hiccups in his sleep, and she reaches over to rub his belly absently. He makes a small, contented sound and tucks his head against her shoulder, and she idly strokes his hair as she reads. Mr. Lyle recommended this novel to her, and she’s enjoying the twists even as it grates against her that she can’t puzzle it out. 

Finally she decides to take a break, and slips out from beneath Ethan to retrieve a fresh cup of coffee to sustain her into the night. But on her way back, she stops short in the doorway of the parlor: Ethan’s silhouette is gone from the sofa. 

Her heartbeat pounds through every inch of her. She would have heard him if he’d gotten up. A shroud of ghostly doubt creeps over her, her mind churning out nightcomers, vampires, any beast that could have taken him. She takes a cautious step into the room. 

“Ethan?” she says softly, and something whines.

She steps closer to the sofa, and her knees nearly buckle with relief as she takes in the animal body, the mass of fur draped across the pillows. She hadn’t noticed the moonlight streaming in through the windows, but — of course. Now, when she sweeps her gaze about the room, it’s all she can see. 

“Ethan?” she asks again, holding her hand within reach of his snout, and he licks her hand appeasingly. “Yes, hello. I suppose this took us both by surprise, didn’t it?”

She reclaims her seat on the sofa and scratches him between the ears. “You gave me a fright,” she scolds gently. “Are you going to be good? I’ll let you upstairs if you won’t tear apart the pillows in the night.”

He nestles closer to her, laying his large head against her chest and tucking his ears back. She laughs and pets the ruff of fur around his face. His coat smells like cedar and earth and witch hazel, like Ethan’s human form, with a strong added note of something she supposes is just —  _ dog _ .

“All right,” she says, gently shoving him toward the floor so she can get up. “Let’s go to bed. You may sleep beside me if you promise not to drool.”

Ethan whines and turns in a circle on the rug, and Vanessa smiles, shaking her head. “Come along,” she entices, holding out her hand. “You first.”

_ You first _ , to Ethan’s wolf form, turns out to mean  _ to every room in the house _ , and Vanessa turns him loose after watching him spin in circles and sniff around five empty rooms. She brushes out her hair at Ethan’s mirror while she waits for his patrol to cease, and it isn’t until she’s turning down the lamps that he prowls back in, his nails clicking against the wood floors. 

“Back from your exploration?” she asks, laying her dressing gown and sweater on the chair in the corner. “Is it safe?”

Ethan leaps onto the bed and settles in, resting his snout on his paws as she settles beside him. “Oh, look at you,” she says with a smile. “I wish you could see how sweet you are like this. You just needed a bit of care.”

She turns down the lamp beside her bed and lays her head on her pillow. Ethan shifts beside her, and then, softly, he begins to growl.

Vanessa goes still. “Ethan,” she says, as quietly and evenly as she can. “It’s all right.”

But he keeps growling, and Vanessa tries to follow his line of sight to the threat. “It’s all right,” she says again, to herself as much as to Ethan. 

Ethan belly-crawls to the edge of the bed, and she sees the fur along his back bristle in his vague silhouette. She blinks in the shapeless dark, and as her eyes adjust, she realizes that he’s angling himself toward the chair where she piled her sweater and dressing gown, and she has to stop herself from laughing and startling him. 

He jumps off the bed and moves in front of her protectively, ears back, a low growl still rumbling from his throat, and as he moves in on the chair, Vanessa reaches for the lamps and turns them up.

“It’s all right,” she repeats, and he turns to look at her in the half-light, head tilted questioningly. Her heartbeat is so loud she imagines he can pick it up, and for a moment they regard each other. 

“Come back here,” she says, patting the mattress beside her enticingly. “You did very well protecting me, but there’s nothing to protect me from.”

He gives the chair a last suspicious look, then leaps back onto the bed, crowding himself near Vanessa. She tousles the ruff of fur at his neck, scratching behind his ears and beneath his chin, and kisses his nose. “You’re very good,” she tells him, turning down the lamps again. “I hope you remember that tomorrow.”

She drifts off to sleep with Ethan still beside her, his snout propped on his pillow, exhaling in heavy pants and low, keening sounds, and she startles awake a few hours later to the sensation of someone tugging at her blankets. Spooked, she rolls over, hoping to see Ethan human again, restless beside her. But instead, she catches the glint of his eyes at wolf-level over his side of the bed. When she leans over for a closer look, she realizes that he’s trying to wrestle the sheets into the same sort of nest she arranged for him in the cellar. 

“You can’t have those,” she tells him, tugging at the sheets. “They’re mine.”

He woofs and cocks his head at her. When she furrows her brow at him, he whines and turns in a circle, then gives her a pleading look.

“No,” she says firmly. “Leave those be.”

He huffs and flops down on the floor, and she flips over and settles in again. She’s just dozing off when there’s a sudden puff of hot air against her face, and she opens her eyes to see Ethan’s soft brown eyes staring back at her intently.

“Ethan,” she says heavily, and his tail wags. “Please. Go to sleep.”

He doesn’t move. She grapples with the reality that she’s having a staring match with a wolf at half-past two in the morning — and worse, that she’s about to give in.

“Fine,” she says, peeling the sheets away from her. “You sleep here. I’ll be down the hall.”

She tucks herself into her own bed, its sheets cool and undisturbed, and settles in to sleep. Until, a few minutes later, she hears the telltale click of his nails on the floor again. She waits for him to nudge the door open, but instead, she listens to him pace back and forth outside her door for the next two hours. Occasionally he flops onto the floor with an unholy  _ thump _ and heaves a sigh so loud that he might as well be in bed beside her, until she hears him haul himself up and begin pacing anew.

She asked for this, Vanessa thinks grimly, trying in vain to ignore the noise. This was her idea. Her suggestion. 

But the longer she lies there, her eyelids growing heavier, the more she thinks about her books on canine behavior. Pacing and destruction are signs of anxiety, restlessness. He doesn’t seem frightened, like he was the first few full moons, keeping himself close to the walls with his ears back and tail between his legs. But now he won’t stay still, and as she listens to him click up and down the hallway, she wonders what they’re missing. They’ve tried making him comfortable, they’ve given him food and toys to make his nights more interesting, they’ve proven that he has a control as a wolf he never thought was possible. Why isn’t that enough?

In the morning, she wakes to find the human Ethan lying beside her, his brown eyes wide. Her own eyes are sticky and tired, and she squints at him from her pillow as he stares at her.

“I changed up here last night,” he says incredulously. It’s clear he’s been up for a while, or at least long enough to pull on an undershirt and the soft pants he sleeps in. His hair is mussed, and stubble is creeping through on his soft chin. “And I didn’t hurt you.”

“No, you didn’t,” she says, pulling the blanket more tightly around her. There’s a dull ache starting in the back of her head, throbbing with her pulse.

“I remember!” he says, rolling onto his side. He smiles, luminous. Vanessa feels one of her eyes twitch. “I checked everything out. Patrolled the whole place. And I stayed close to you.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. Her voice feels a full octave lower on so little sleep. “You protected me from the very menacing chair in your room, and you didn’t leave me alone all night.”

He looks pleased with himself as he turns onto his back, and then he catches her eye.

“You sleep all right, Miss Ives?” he asks, the excitement on his face draining to concern. “You look a little —”

“A little what?” asks Vanessa, just punchy enough to spar. “A little tired, perhaps? That’s because your patrol and protection kept me awake most of the night. All that sighing and pacing and your nails on the floor.”

“Oh, Christ,” says Ethan, burying his face in his pillow. “I’m so sorry. I didn't mean to keep you up.”

When he lifts his head, his eyes are soft and apologetic, and Vanessa reaches for him, strokes at his hair. “I’m not trying to dull your excitement,” she says, feeling a bit like a killjoy. “It just seemed like you were still missing something. You had the run of the house, you could explore to your heart’s content, and that still didn’t keep you occupied. I’m not sure what else there is.”

Ethan chews his lower lip. “It did feel strange,” he admits. “Like I was still cooped up, and the corral was just bigger.”

Vanessa sighs heavily. “Well, we can’t turn you loose in the streets. Someone will shoot you.”

“Whoa, whoa,” he says. “We don’t need a solution right now. And not after I’ve kept you up all night. It’s all right, Vanessa. We’ll figure something out.” He trails a hand through her hair and brings his hand to rest at her cheek. “You sleep for now, okay? I’m gonna scrounge up some breakfast. You want me to go out and get you something? I can go to that bakery you like …?”

Normally she would say no, there’s no need to inconvenience him, whatever he’ll make for breakfast will be fine. But she’s tired, and frustrated, and he looks so contrite that she says, “I wouldn’t say no if you brought something back. Make sure you get something for yourself, too.”

He wriggles closer to her and presses a kiss to her forehead. “Oh, I will,” he says, and Vanessa gives him a worn-out smile.

“Wake me if I sleep past dinner,” she says, trying to press as much forgiveness into her voice as possible.

“As you wish, Miss Ives,” says Ethan with a soft smile, and he kisses her forehead again before rolling off the bed, the bed creaking under his weight. Vanessa shuffles herself into the dip his body leaves behind before the mattress can rise up again. She inhales his woodsy smell, soaks in his warmth, and burrows deeper into the covers, willing her mind to smooth out with sleep.

She dreams of ghosts, the companionable prickle of spirits at her shoulders, and wakes with a hole punched in her chest, longing crawling out like spiders. There’s a pressure between her ribs, and she lies on her back, staring at the ceiling. She considers bringing herself off to see if it will help, the languid sleepiness of early afternoon stirring something vague in her, but can’t quite get started. Hesitantly, she tries thinking of Ethan, of the helpless little sounds he makes when he’s too full, but it’s like the sharp flicker of a lamp before it goes out — a flare of heat, and then nothing. 

She removes her hand and turns over onto her stomach. Her mind wanders back to ghosts, the gossip and chatter that had whispered around her when she took Ethan around London to test her intuition. It’s been several weeks since she had an spiritualist engagement, and she realizes that this is the longest she’s gone without calling on her abilities since the Devil made himself known to her four years ago. She’s been taking more walks alone lately, sitting in the cemetery just to feel as if she’s still a part of the spiritual realm, but it doesn’t feel like enough anymore — she wants to be  _ involved _ .

But there isn’t much she can do if Mr. Lyle doesn’t call on her with an engagement, and the probability of obtaining any work while he’s in Egypt seems hopelessly low. Going about London claiming to laymen that she can speak with spirits, on the other hand, seems like a singular path back to an institution. 

Discouraged, she shuffles downstairs and into her study, gathering her cards absently, still shaking cobwebs of sleep from her mind. She spreads the cards, hovers her hand above them, pulls three: the High Priestess, Six of Swords, the cursed Eight of Swords again.

Well, all right, she thinks, squinting at them. The High Priestess refers to her: spirituality, intuition. The Six of Swords: abandonment, retreat, a change of location. She draws in a sharp breath, considering it with the Eight of Swords. That must be Ethan, pacing through Grandage Place like a trapped animal. Not — not  _ like _ . An animal in a prison she engineered. 

_ No _ , she thinks, seeing the picture come together. This leaves her back where she started — she  _ knows  _ Ethan is restless, knows that the change of location from the cellar to the house proper did nothing to make him feel more comfortable. How is her intuition supposed to help this, when all of the conclusions she drew were  _ wrong _ ? 

_ Like you’re not a little feral _ , Ethan said the other day, and she knows that of herself. She always has — it’s what has saved her, over and over, from losing herself to the dark. She loves it with a fearsome, desperate rage: this is what makes her  _ her _ , and not one of millions of normal people around her. She knows her own mettle because of this — she knows how much she is capable of. This is what has brought everything she has to her. It seems so cruel that it can’t sustain her unless she’s actively under threat.

She sits back in her chair, frustrated. What is a medium without spirits? A tap without water. A door that opens to a void. A strange, tired creature rattling around an old, sad house. 

She slips back upstairs before Ethan can notice she’s up and crawls back into bed, the pressure in her chest cracking her open slowly. Her mind is ghostly quiet, none of the cacophony that signals possession, but oh, she thinks as she turns over, how that silence can feel like a tomb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "shower day," the amazing devil


	14. death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "roma white," owel
> 
> cw: one character has a depressive episode. despite the title, there is no death!

Vanessa’s mood does not improve with sleep, that day or the next. She continues spending the nights in her room, which doesn’t bother Ethan except that she’s been spending  _ days  _ in her room as well, and despite his peering in every few hours to make sure she’s all right, she hasn’t been much for human contact, or for food. Even the little almond cakes he brought her from the bakery the other day — when he brought them up to her, she’d picked at them enough to be polite and then told him he could have the rest, and he couldn’t help feeling like he’d failed her somehow.

He can remember, with startling clarity, everything that happened during the full moon, so he knows that, aside from his restlessness, he hasn’t done anything to upset her or threaten her. But his restlessness worries him, too, and he wonders if it worries Vanessa. Even Grandage Place’s endless maze of empty rooms didn’t feel like enough space for him to roam, and he remembers yearning for grass, scents that weren’t  _ dust  _ or  _ human _ . He wants to run, he realizes. Six months ago, he would never have allowed himself the freedom. But he has more control now than he’s ever had, and the realization that he could handle himself out in the wild is as reassuring as it is damning. 

But there’s a tendril of a vine strung through the slats of his ribs that wants so badly to stay here, running in the comfortable groove he’s formed with Vanessa, against his well-trod instinct to flee. He clings to it as he checks on Vanessa. And checks on Vanessa. And checks on Vanessa.

“Hey there,” he says, coming into her room around four, a hot cup of tea and a plate of marrow on toast balanced in his hands. Vanessa has taken to keeping marrow bones in the icebox for full moons, but Ethan, uneasy and in need of a task, spent part of today roasting some for dinner and turning the rest into soup for supper in between baking up the loaves of bread he spent yesterday anxiously kneading. If Vanessa won’t eat much, at least he can try to make sure that what she  _ does  _ eat is rich and nourishing. 

Vanessa is curled in the dying afternoon sun in the little offshoot of her room, her face pale and her eyes heavy. She nods at him, and he steps forward, encouraged. 

“Can I sit with you?” he asks, and she nods again. He carefully sets the tea and toast on the floor and settles beside her, adjusting his trousers where they dig into his belly. “How are you feeling?”

She shrugs listlessly. “Very quiet.”

“But not in danger,” he says, and she shakes her head.

“No, of that I’m sure. That feels very different. Open, and raw, noise coming in from all angles.”

“Okay,” he says cautiously. “Well, that’s something good.”

He nudges the tea and toast toward her, but she doesn’t make any move to take it. Her hair is lank and greasy where it sits knotted on her head, and he half-considers getting up to find a brush, but — small steps. 

“Did you eat something?” she asks hoarsely, and he frowns. 

“Sure I did. This is for you.”

She turns away from him a little. “I’m all right, thank you.”

“Please, Vanessa,” he pleads, covering her hand with his. “If I’ve gotta eat, you’ve gotta eat. Come on. I haven’t seen you eat more than to pick at something in a couple days.”

“It’s difficult,” she hisses, and he knows that, he  _ knows _ . But he’s here until they’re both bones if he has to be.

“When has that ever stopped you from doing something?” he asks softly. “You didn’t give up on me, remember? What can I do to help you?”

“I don’t know,” she snaps, the words barbed. And then, helpless in a way he’s never heard her, almost wilted: “I think I’m having a bit of a crisis.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding, and she lets him tuck his arm around her. “I would say so, Miss Ives.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” she confesses, her hands laced together in her lap. “I don’t know how I can be what I am, without — without —  _ being  _ it. Do you understand?”

His brow furrows. “Walk me through it.”

“I’ve never gone so long without  _ using  _ my abilities before,” she says, staring straight ahead. “Not since I developed them. But without anywhere to focus them — I don’t know what good they are if I’m not under threat. But I  _ want  _ to use them. I miss that connection. I miss feeling a part of that demimonde. Is that strange?” She gives a harsh, self-deprecating laugh. “Of course it’s strange. But perhaps I cannot be devoted to God and also this — this —  _ thing _ . Is there no way to reconcile them? Must I always exist in the shadow between those spaces?”

“Hey,” says Ethan softly, stroking her cheek. Her eyes flutter closed, but she doesn’t pull away, which is more than he can ask for at the moment. “You were faithful even when the Devil had his teeth in you. I don’t think that’s a condition you need to worry about. And you enjoyed helping people with their poltergeists and dead relatives, right? There’s use for it.”

“And how am I to advertise myself without seeming unstable?” she snaps, curling further into herself. Her bare feet are white against the cold wood floor, and he’s itching to bring her socks, or a blanket, anything to bring some warmth back to her. Vanessa has been looking so much healthier over the past few months, her cheeks pinker, the angles of her face softened a little, and he hadn’t realized  _ quite  _ how much healthier she looked until seeing her like this, pale and snarled and miserable. “There’s no use for me here.”

“Maybe you aren’t supposed to be just one thing,” he says, and the part of him that wants to share a house with Vanessa and run wild every month howls out. He knows, somewhere hard and inarguable in his core, that he’s the same. It’s too small here, and neither of them are configured for convention. “Maybe it’s not about finding a way to reconcile them, but finding a way to live in the shadow between them.”

The shadow Ethan walks in doesn’t feel like a shadow anymore. It’s a night that gives way to a daytime and back again, afternoons of driving rain clearing to a bright sky of constellations calling out to the moon, giving way to sunlight he’s no longer afraid to believe he deserves. There’s no having one without the other, and whatever Vanessa feels she can’t balance — he understands.

“What are you trying to balance?” he asks, and when he tugs one hand away from where it’s pinned between her knee and her forehead, she lets him, lifting her head some. “Your abilities and — what?”

She shrugs helplessly. “I barely know anymore,” she croaks. “This? Everything we’ve built here, together. I understand there’s no being normal, and I don’t want that anyway. But it’s proven so difficult to feel like myself without that supernatural part, and if I can’t be either of those things then I don’t know what else is left.”

She stares ahead as he works his hand over hers, uncurling her stiff, cold fingers and kneading the tension from her palms. He feels so large beside her, like he could wrap his whole self around her and shield her from the world. He must weigh at least twice what Vanessa does by now, maybe a little more since she’s so thin.

“I don’t know either,” he says finally, frustrated that he doesn’t have a better answer for her. “But I can tell you that it’s possible to live in that space. I’ll admit, I was doubtful when you suggested embracing my wolf instead of running from it. It felt like nothing on this earth could convince me away from the monster I thought I was. Like learning more about it would only make it worse.” He takes a deep breath. “But I was wrong. The other night, I had the run of the house, and I could have attacked you, and I could have tried to run. But I didn’t do either. Because I could control myself enough to make that decision. And because you trusted me, and helped me trust myself, to be able to gain that control.”

He shifts his weight against the wall, his stomach moving as he adjusts his hips. “Given, I gained a little more than just that,” he says, trying to make her smile. “But it turned out that taking care of myself was part of that control, and now having that control helps me feel better about myself.” 

Vanessa doesn’t move, and he nudges her with his shoulder. “You need to take care of yourself,” he says quietly. “And if that means finding an outlet or some such for your powers, then that’s what it means.”

She nods slowly, and she raises her head to lay it against his shoulder. “Would you draw me a bath?” she asks, her voice papery, and he nods.

“Of course. You wanna indulge me and have this toast first?”

She doesn’t look enthused, but she picks up one slice and takes a cautious bite.

“You let me know if you need some help,” he says, and she nibbles her way around the slice until it’s just middle left, and then she eats that slow, spacing out the bites like she’s checking them over for poison. 

She pauses, drawing in breaths as if steeling herself, and Ethan picks up the second slice of toast and breaks off a piece, raising his eyebrows in question.

“Would you?” she whispers, and he brings it to her lips. She accepts it, and the relief in his stomach hits him like a fist.

He feeds her piece by piece, keeping her lips clean with his thumb, and fills her teacup with water when he realizes her tea has gone lukewarm. She sips at it, and he kisses her shoulder, her cheek, her temple before leaving to draw her bath. 

It’s hard to walk away from her. He knows Vanessa is strong — he’s seen her face down the Devil and come out swinging. But sometimes she gets so — so like one of those flowers so paper-thin it crumbles at your touch, and when he glances over his shoulder at her from the hallway, he can sort of understand why this whole caretaking deal is so appealing to her. There’s something about giving someone your whole heart on a plate and watching them grow stronger from it. 

He expects that she’ll still be curled in the corner when he steps out of the bathroom to tell her the bath is ready, but finds her hanging in the hall like a specter, her nightgown swapped out for a large white towel. 

“I understand if it’s — inappropriate,” she says hesitantly. “But … would you stay with me?”

“Miss Ives,” he says, “I wake up indecently in front of you three nights a month and you continue to put up with it, for some reason. Least I can do is give you some company.”

Vanessa smiles thinly. “Thank you, Mr. Chandler.”

He averts his eyes as she gets into the bath, and when she gives her permission, settles behind her and gently washes her hair, scrubbing a bar of castile soap through the long, thick strands and trying to untangle it as he goes. She has  _ so  _ much hair, he thinks, working the soap through more and more of it. No wonder she avoids washing it when she’s feeling like this.

The water is still warm when he finishes, and it’s clear she isn’t in the mood to talk, so he ducks out and combs her room for books, grabbing a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning he recognizes because Vanessa always brings it into the cellar. He sits on the floor beside the tub and reads until the water grows cold. Halfway through, Vanessa’s hand creeps out of the bath and begins stroking at his hair, and the contact seems such a positive sign that he doesn’t even mind the tepid water trickling down the back of his neck. 

“Could you hand me that towel?” she asks finally, and Ethan passes her the one on the rack, and carefully turns so she can get out.

When he judges from the sounds of her movements that she’s dried off and bundled up, he turns back to offer to brush out her hair for her, but stops short, mortified, when he realizes that the towel he passed her is wrapped around her hair and none of the rest of her.

“Miss Ives!” he yelps, spinning back around. “Sorry, sorry. Thought you were all covered up. You need another towel? Here you go.” He fumbles for the white one she came in with and thrusts it blindly behind him until she takes it. “Christ. Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she says evenly. “I think you must be the only man in this house who hasn’t bathed me himself. If it’s nothing to you, Mr. Chandler, it’s nothing to me.”

“Nothing at all,” he says, so unthinkingly that he knows it’s indisputable. Maybe in another life, it would be something. But now, he wonders what it says about him, the man he is now, that the only thing he noticed about her form was the little swell of fat below her navel. It’s deeply comforting to him — she’s always been so gaunt, and she used to struggle so much with food, and — in the same way he looks at his own sturdy softness and sees strength and health, so too does he see it in Vanessa. 

He offers to help with her hair, but she declines. He’s seen her brushing out her hair before bed, the act of it almost meditative, and he figures she might need that right about now.

So he kisses the top of her head, tells her to yell if she needs him, and heads back downstairs, where his bone broth is simmering nicely. He adds some spices, tastes it, adds some more, and gets to chopping vegetables. At the very least, if Vanessa’s still not enthusiastic about eating later, she can sip on something nutritious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "living room, ny," laura stevenson


	15. temperance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "i'll be your girl," the decemberists

A while later, he hears her on the stairs, and his spirits rise a bit at the thought that she’s out of her room. But she doesn’t show up in the kitchen, and when he listens harder, he thinks he can hear her moving around toward her study. 

He circles through the kitchen, the rhythm of cooking a cozy mirror to the circles he remembers turning through the hallway the other night while Vanessa slept — or didn’t sleep. But there’s something else underneath the comfort of pacing a familiar path to the counter, around the table, back to the stove and fireplace — it soothes something in him that he doesn’t know how to explain. The other night, he’d been so frustrated that he couldn’t better express his restlessness, that no matter how much he paced and huffed there was no real way to make Vanessa understand what he was feeling. The wolf in him is tangled up in the man, and it makes for some real difficulty in communication even within his own head.

The realization is such a shove that he stumbles as it hits him. Of course he can’t make those two halves untangle, because when it comes down to it, he’s neither man nor wolf — he’s the space where they overlap. Those pieces of him exist at an eternal intersection, and if he’s ever going to be fully, wholly comfortable, he needs to figure out how to exist with _both_ of them. Not fully wild, like he used to be, but — despite Vanessa’s best, blessed, well-meaning efforts — not fully domesticated, either.

He crushes a few cloves of garlic under the side of his knife. Well, he thinks, his heart growing heavy. Maybe there isn’t as much of a place for him here as he’d thought. Not because of anything Vanessa has tried or wants to be true, but because a creature living in that overlap isn’t made for the clear-cut propriety of London. He’s something half-wild, and it’s no wonder he’s spent most of his time in this city feeling like he only half-fits. 

There’s a sudden yowl and a crash from Vanessa’s study, and Ethan drops his knife and runs. He skids to a stop outside the room, his lungs jagged with panic, scanning for what’s wrong. 

Vanessa is hunched in her chair, her legs crossed beneath her, and what appears to be her full tarot deck is scattered around her, cards wilting off the desk and fluttering toward the floor.

No. She’s not hunched _in_ her chair. She’s hunched, hovering slightly _over_ her chair. All of Ethan’s bones go cold.

“Vanessa,” he exhales, pausing in the doorway. “Vanessa, what happened?”

She lifts her head from the crook of her elbow to face him, and he frantically examines her for signs of possession before he realizes he doesn’t know what to look for. He takes a cautious step into the room, his hands held up in front of him. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t _know_!” she snarls, and the cards swarm up from the floor like crows before scattering again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Ethan takes another step closer. “Miss Ives, I just need to check. I’m speaking with _you_ , aren’t I? Not anyone else?”

The look she turns on him is so deeply _Vanessa_ , hurt and proud and sharp-clawed, that some of the doubt eases up where it’s piled in his stomach. “Okay,” he says, and she nods briskly. “Just wanted to be sure.”

“They’re taunting me,” she says unhappily, and that’s when he notices the three cards on her desk, still despite the turmoil unfolding around them. “I was frustrated, and I shouted, and — the deck —” She gestures to the cards on the floor.

“Okay,” says Ethan. Another step. “ _You_ did that?”

Vanessa purses her lips, and she drops back to the seat of her chair. Something in Ethan’s chest goes slack in a relief he can’t name. “I didn’t intend to. But yes, it was my emotion that caused it.”

He’s only a step or two away from her now, careful not to step on her cards. She looks less defensive and more just — small. Crumpled. “What do they say?” he asks, standing over her shoulder. The cards don’t make sense to him, and they all look vaguely menacing if he’s honest, but Vanessa can pull meaning out of them like guts from an animal. 

She turns and looks at him over her shoulder, goblin-like, her eyes narrow and weary. “Do you really want to know?”

“’Course I do,” he says. “Okay if I touch you?”

She nods once, briskly, and he settles his hands on her shoulders, digging his thumbs in where there’s tension. “Might help to talk it out?” he prompts. “If it’s bothering you?”

Vanessa sighs beneath his hands. “This is the Hanged Man,” she says, sliding the far left card toward him. He winces: it depicts a pair of legs entangled in what look to be the tentacles of some sea creature. Ethan’s never been much for the water, never learned to swim, and he doesn’t trust the ocean the way Vanessa does. “It represents a new perspective, or a sacrifice for knowledge. Often it comes up if I haven’t properly heeded the cards I drew the day before. 

“This is the Nine of Swords. Depression, or fear of the worst. What wakes you in the night.” She turns the card upside-down, so that its swords appear to be falling out of the rat they’re stabbed into, then back around again. Ethan makes a face at it. Every card in this deck is so fucking grim.

Vanessa continues, “I pulled it upright, but it flipped with my — outburst. There isn’t much difference between them, honestly. Reversed simply represents a desire to remove oneself from the mire, though it doesn’t guarantee that you _will_.

“And the Chariot,” she says finally, an edge in her voice. “Caught between two sides of yourself, as I described to you. It suggests there is a way to unite those forces, and even that you _must_ if you’re to move forward.”

“Okay,” says Ethan, trying to sound encouraging as he works to hold it all in his head. At least the Chariot card has imagery he recognizes: a human figure hanging onto a bull in — okay, in admittedly what looks like a pretty racy situation. Christ. But if he doesn’t look too hard, it looks a little like rodeo. “So there is a way to move forward.”

“ _Is_ there?” she hisses, and he tightens his grip on her shoulders — not enough to hurt, but enough that he hopes it might ground her, like her grip on his wrists grounds him. 

“There’s gotta be,” he says. “We’ll find one.” 

He studies her, and as she moves her gaze back to the cards before her, he realizes there’s another one, stuck in the thick bushel of her hair. 

“What’s this one?” he asks, picking up the card with two fingers and showing it to her, and she pulls her lips back in a grimace. Ethan does, too, but at the image on the card: a millipede laid in an infinite loop over a human torso, _no thank you_.

“The Magician,” she says flatly. “Ability, control. A full arsenal of tools, and the knowledge of how to use them.”

He nods to the scattered sea of cards around them. “Looks a little bit like the work of a magician, Miss Ives. Maybe you _do_ need an outlet for that power of yours.”

“A very poor magician,” she says, and all of the scorn in her voice is turned inward. “This power is useless if it’s just going to tantrum.”

She’s quiet. His gaze wanders back to the Chariot card, the rider and the bull, and he ventures, “You ever ridden a horse, Miss Ives?”

Her look up at him is swift and annoyed. “No, though I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Well, the picture on the card —” He gestures. “You have to treat the animal as an extension of yourself. A part of you, even. You might think you’re two separate creatures, but once you enter the contract of that ride, so to speak, you have to let it have some control, or you’re gonna end up on your ass in the dirt.” He glances at her to see if she’s picking up his metaphor, but her brow is still furrowed.

He blows out a breath. “When I met you, I couldn’t control my shift at all. I had those blackouts, you know. I couldn’t remember anything the day after. I had no control. But the more I listened to myself — to the human _and_ to the wolf — the more I started to understand that I wasn’t giving any of myself what I needed. I needed to let both parts share the reins if I was going to figure out a way to live with it. I know you don’t struggle the same way with your abilities, but — maybe it’s a part of you that needs to be exercised like anything else. It might have wants and needs of its own. Maybe you need to be somewhere it can be useful.”

She growls softly in response and moves the cards around the table as if they might make sense in a different order. He gazes over her head at the unsettling illustrations. “What did you draw yesterday?” he asks.

“Not yesterday,” she says, turning toward him, “but the day before. It summarized my suspicions about your situation.” She sighs heavily. “It suggested that you weren’t helped by the change of location when you shifted, and instead you felt — trapped. And it suggested that my intuition was to be of help somehow, but I’m at such a loss for _how_.”

“You read for me?” he asks, surprised, and she cuts a confused look at him.

“Not especially, no. But you’re such a part of me that my readings often reflect you as well.” Her eyes flick away, then back. “So you do feel trapped.”

He shifts his weight, rubs the rough side of his thumb against the pad of his index finger. “I’m a wild animal, Miss Ives,” he says finally. “I appreciate your efforts more than I can say. But no amount of treating that wolf like a dog’s gonna make it take.”

“You’re not an _animal_ ,” she starts, but he covers her hand gently with hers. 

“Part of me is. And I think I need to honor that.”

“How?” she asks, her brows coming together, and he looks away. A few hours ago, she was brittle and bitter in his arms, and he has soup simmering for her in the kitchen, and he can’t say it yet, that _how_ might boil down to _leaving_.

“Miss Ives, I’m no expert,” he says instead, and he _knows_ from the way she stares up at him, hard and beveled to a point, that she catches his deflection. “But — what’s that hanged one say? New perspectives? What does that reading say if you read it for _you_?”

Something flickers in Vanessa’s eyes, and she tugs away from him. “The High Priestess, the Six of Swords, the Eight of Swords,” she murmurs, and he can tell from the downward cast of her eyes that the words aren’t for him. 

She’s quiet for a long, long moment, and Ethan starts to wonder if this is the kind of thing he’s supposed to leave her to. “I’m gonna check on supper,” he says gently. “You need any help gathering these up?”

He indicates the cards on the floor, and she shakes her head, touches his arm gently. “Thank you, Mr. Chandler,” she says, her voice much softer. “But I’d prefer to get them together myself.”

He nods, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready to eat,” he says. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Back in the kitchen, he stirs the soup with tension mounting in his chest, laying the consequences of taking his own advice out before him. He needs to run, he lets himself admit. He needs more than this old, sad house can give him, and breaking that to Vanessa’s not going to be an easy feat.

He’d sworn to himself, months ago now, that he wouldn’t let himself become enamored with all the trappings of domestic life, and it’s a promise he’s been mostly happy to break, sinking into the gentle comfort of Vanessa’s hands in his hair and her fingertips brushing at his lips, big suppers and lazy breakfasts, soft places to sleep and soft days slept away. And yet now, with the reality of his own wildness staring back at him in sharp relief, he thinks that the hardest part about leaving all of this behind won’t be the creature comforts, but the semblance of pack that he’s finally found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "little hell," city and colour


	16. the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "boreas," the oh hellos

Vanessa gathers her cards slowly, stopping every few to tuck her hair behind her ears. She didn’t have the energy to pin it up earlier, and it’s growing wild and defiant as it dries. The cards from the other day hang in her mind, Ethan’s questions turning them upside-down and then right-side-up again. What if that reading  _ was  _ for her, and not for Ethan, as she’d thought?

She tries to think of the last time she felt really  _ useful _ , not just some kind of supernatural burden, or the object of an eternal Satanic quest. When did she last feel  _ fulfilled  _ by what she was?

That fritzing feeling is back in her core, the same vaguely uneasy stammer that filled her just before she’d caused the cards to scatter. Although her outburst hadn’t made her feel  _ better _ , exactly, it eased the pressure enough to calm her anxiety about it momentarily. She closes her eyes, tries to empty herself of confusion, of frustration, of bitterness, so this new wave will dissipate. 

The cards are warm, a living creature, as she collects them, and she focuses on their heat and life as the electric feeling inside her presses against her skin. She can tell without looking which ones Ethan touched as she shuffles them all back together, his energy as sharp and clear as the witch hazel scent of his aftershave. 

When she’s reasonably sure that she has it under control, she tucks her cards back in their drawer and makes her way to the kitchen, where Ethan is leaning over the stove, poking at a large pot. Uneasiness is coming off him in waves, and she rubs her hands up and down her arms as if it will slough the excess electricity from her body. 

“You’re worried,” she says, stepping into the kitchen, and he turns, fussing with the dishcloth tossed over his shoulder. “Not about me, I hope.”

He hesitates, wiping his hands and then flipping the dishcloth off his shoulder and over the back of a kitchen chair. “Not about you,” he says finally. “About me.”

“What about?” she asks, taking a seat at the table. He sits across from her, the crease between his eyebrows deep and sorrowful.

“I keep thinking about the other night,” he says heavily. “All the pacing. The uneasiness. This whole house to roam through, and it still wasn’t enough.”

Vanessa has been expecting that, but it still feels a bit like the chair has been tugged from beneath her. “I wondered,” she says quietly, and he nods, staring at his hands in his lap. She wishes she were close enough to reach over and quiet them. 

“I worry that I’m gonna have to leave if I ever want to be truly comfortable this way,” he says, barely audible, and six swords plunge through Vanessa’s stomach.

“Leave?” she asks, trying to keep the raggedness out of her voice, the devastation rushing in at the thought of his absence. It shouldn’t be surprising, she tells herself. She had to have known it was coming. “ _ Why _ ?”

Ethan exhales. “I need to be what I am, Miss Ives, and I don’t think I can do that here.”

She’s poised to push back, to refuse to understand, but the wildness in his voice calls out to something wild in her. In the same way she sometimes craves the barrenness of the moors, she thinks, he must crave the freedom to be a wild, feral thing — it must feel suffocating to be without it, in the same way the Devil’s vision felt for her. The walls closing in, a tight collar about her neck, ever constricting. Grandage Place is large, but their wildness is larger, a looming, toothed thing that no measure of social graces or corseting can tame. 

The static in her chest is building again, a sharp electric sizzle that she tries and tries to swallow back. She grinds her teeth, desperately trying to ground it, curling her fists at her sides, shuddering from the sheer effort of trying to trap it inside herself. Behind her, the plates and teacups on the hutch begin to rattle, and she bares her teeth, her fingernails biting into her palms. 

_ I need to be what I am. _

She draws a deep breath in, struggling to contain the wave moving through her, and in that moment of slipped focus, her mind opens. The moors were the prison of her choosing once, a willing, excruciating sacrifice for knowledge. She’s become accustomed to London’s bustle and holler and the sanctuary Grandage Place provides, its amenities, its soothing paternal presences of Sir Malcom and Sembene alike. But the more London surges forward, modernity sleek and electric at its helm, the more Vanessa feels adrift — all the knowledge she gained in that cottage, her headful of herbal remedies and potions and folk healing, is rendered useless here by medicine, by ideology. 

But the moors — the hush of the forest, the lush, quiet peace of gathering plants and herbs, the rush of the wind across the grasslands. The comfort of being a person known for strangeness, a provider of remedies and divination and intuition. The High Priestess, her altar a cottage, her prison unmade. 

She can see it unfolding before her, the future racing through her with the crackle and blitz of limelights bursting to life. The moors, with plenty of space to wander, to hunt, the whispers of wind and spirits to lift her hair from her shoulders. A garden, two beds if one isn’t enough, the jangle of the hanging charms and chimes, a house so imbued with  _ her _ , with  _ them _ , that it could become a place for staying. 

The growing static suddenly feels too big for her body, like it might swallow her, and she opens her eyes, thrusting the power outside of herself. All of the lamps in the room blaze so brightly that the kitchen, for a moment, gives way to pure light.

When the lamps sputter out again a second later, her chest feels clearer. It’s easier to breathe, and when she blinks, Ethan is staring at her, his own eyes wide. She looks back at him, something new and sure blossoming through her. 

“You’re right,” she says, her voice hoarse. The edges of her nerves are pulsing with tiny aftershocks of relief, a silver thread of power singing through her. “We can go back to the moors, or somewhere like. This house is so grim, anyway. It would do us both good to have more space to roam.”

Ethan cocks his head, leaning forward. “ _ We _ ? Vanessa, what —?!”

He sounds confused, but not in a way that rejects her. There’s a kernel of hope flaring out through his somber demeanor, the first green sprout through a field of ash. She exhales, revitalized. 

“If you go, I’m going with you,” she says, and something slips in Ethan’s face, a soft twist of his mouth that wrenches something deep in her chest. “I can be of use there. Everything I know about witchery grows out of those moors. Everything I am, I learned there. It isn’t like London, where people rely on doctors or alienists to treat their ills. And I — I think I would feel better, too, if I were somewhere that sort of knowledge wasn’t just known, but sought after.”

Ethan is watching her like he isn’t quite sure if he can believe it. “That have anything to do with these, uh, outbursts you’ve had today?” he asks slowly, and she bundles her hair over her shoulder, running her fingers through its ends. 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “For a while I’ve been feeling strange, like there’s all of this — energy — choked up inside me. I suppose I did need an outlet, as you suggested. The moors will be more than a sufficient balm for it, I think. Everything there is haunted somehow.”

“Oh, and London isn’t?” he asks, raising an eyebrow and she shakes her head ruefully, letting go of her hair and feeling it roll back over shoulders, thick and willful.

“London will never run dry of spirits, I fear. But the moors know they are haunted, and accept that of themselves, and London pretends to be above such things.”

“Well,” he says, reaching across the table for her hand, “then it seems like we’ll have no trouble fitting in.”

“Just imagine it,” she says, her voice dropping low with the thought, leaning forward to meet him. “We’ll have all the space in the world to be as we are. We both need somewhere to run wild, so to speak, but we’ll have a place to come back to.”

“Someone to come home to,” Ethan overlaps, and when she meets his eyes, his smile is cautious. She grasps his hand tightly, firm in its wanting. The moment hangs, tentative, crystalline, and Vanessa closes her eyes, hoping that it won’t shatter when she opens them.

Instead, Ethan is gazing back at her, his brown eyes damp. “So we’ll go together,” he says, an offer as much as an agreement, and Vanessa nods, a new tightness in her throat whose origin is decidedly less supernatural. She feels the ends of her hair lift up as she inhales, and Ethan smiles a little, wetly.

“Christ, I love you,” he says thickly, and the words buoy her even as they drop anchor in her chest. 


	17. the tower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "various storms and saints," florence + the machine

They’re both quiet as they eat supper. Ethan’s soup is rich and savory, and although Vanessa’s appetite is still anemic, she finds it in herself to finish the better part of a bowl for his sake. It keeps her warm, at least, as his words send a draught of cold through her each time she remembers them.

Ethan has said it aloud before, in passing, and to some extent she chalks it up to his Americanness, his tendency to be less formal than his English company. But now, on the heels of such a decision — it makes her nervous. What if he’s expecting them to settle down as husband and wife once they begin to make their home on the moors?

After supper, they retire to the parlor, and Vanessa gets a fire going while Ethan watches from the sofa, one hand resting on his stomach. The heat brings her blood to the surface of her cheeks as she pokes at the logs, watching them catch and crumble against each other, quicker to ignition the closer they sit. 

She tries to hold onto that heat as she curls beside Ethan, but her stomach swoops again, stealing it and siphoning it out. He puts an arm around her shoulders, his fingers in the ends of her hair. His usual cedary smell is muffled beneath the homey scents of rosemary, roast chicken, and fresh bread, and it tightens the impossible knot in her chest, unsettling in how domestic it seems. She swallows hard, bites her lip.

“You love me,” she repeats, low and fissured, and he looks at her in surprise.

“Of course I do.”

“I know you do,” she backtracks, and he tilts his head, confused. “I don’t mean that I doubt you. But — if we’re to continue this way, together, I need to know  _ how _ .”

He squints at her, his mouth going flat. “How?” he echoes, and she nods, clasping her hands safely in her lap. 

“You mean —” he starts, and trails off. “Are you worried about your faith? Sharing a bed like we do? Is that it? Is that why you sleep alone? God, Vanessa, you’ve been through enough with that, if I’m — I don’t want to complicate it.” 

Vanessa feels herself go dark. “That complicates nothing for me,” she says shortly. “We aren’t — intimate.” 

But her stomach turns instantly on the lie. She has never desired any sexual contact with Ethan; they have never undressed each other. But the things they’ve seen together — the conversations they’ve had in front of the dying fire on cold nights — his unflinching willingness to let her hold him when he wakes sobbing from a dream — the gentleness with which he’s washed her hair after a streak of sleepless nights — Ethan trusted her instincts before he fully understood the supernatural, and Vanessa forgave him before she understood his particular curse. She cannot imagine a way of being with him that could be more intimate than this.

“Aren’t we?” whispers Ethan, running a troubled hand through his hair. “Aren’t we, Vanessa? 

It rips through her to think he might understand what she means. She closes her eyes for a long moment, trying to find space around it to breathe. “Yes,” she says finally, a curt hiss trapped between her teeth. “Like I’ve never known.”

Ethan shifts on the sofa so that he’s angled toward her. “Is that all right with you?” he says, the words tipping up. His eyes are uneasy, and she wonders if he, too, is thinking of the night on the moors when the storm threw them together. The brief, electric moment of his lips on hers, startling, illuminating,  _ strange _ beyond all else. The fear that had raced in as soon as she processed what was happening, the force with which she’d shoved him back, the terror of the Devil taking hold. 

“I do enjoy your companionship,” she says haltingly, staring down at her hands. “I can’t imagine being without it. You bring me so much peace that I don’t worry about my soul. But … that is all that I can give you. Not because of my soul. Some forms of intimacy have become — anathema to me, or perhaps I wasn’t made for them in the first place. I know it’s not — conventional. But the way we are is the most that I can give. I understand if this isn’t satisfactory to you, but I feel that it’s something we should settle before we strike out together.”

“Miss Ives,” he says, teasing his fingers through the ends of her hair, “I have never loved you because you’re  _ conventional _ .”

She smiles, but it still feels tight. He can love her and have no idea how to live with the boundaries she’s trying to set. “Does it worry  _ you _ ? To share as we do?”

“Not a bit,” he says, so easily that she believes it. “But I don’t have the relationship with God that you do. And if it would make it easier — I would marry you. I hope you know that.”

She knows he catches the tension that springs to her shoulders, because immediately he says, “In name, and nothing else. And  _ only  _ if that’s what you want.”

“It’s not what I want,” she says quietly, meeting his eyes. “I want —  _ this _ . Sleeping chastely beside you. Reading in each other’s arms. Your hand in mine, without any expectation. I love you, Ethan. But, as with so many other things, my way is not the way of God.”

Ethan bites his lip, tilts his head. “I have more faith in the two of us than I do in God.” 

It overwhelms her for a moment, derailing in its honesty, and she bows her head. “Ethan.”

He waits. 

“The Devil showed me a perfect future,” she says finally. “Or so he thought. We were married, you and I. We had children, two of them. It was idyllic. But —”

“But it wasn’t right,” he guesses, and she nods. 

“It was toothless. So  _ normal _ , in ways that felt all wrong. Everything of us — erased. Who are we without our history? I don’t want you to love me despite what I am, but  _ as  _ what I am. The things I know about you, the things I love — I know them because of what we are.”

“I love you for everything you are,” he says, settling his hand on the strip of sofa between them. “But I don’t think that’s conventional, either. I think you’re — what do you say? My true friend. Like Mina was yours. I think you’re part of my pack. I don’t think I have better words for it than that.”

She lets out a breath. Puts her hand on top of his. “I don’t know that I do, either.”

“Well,” says Ethan, shifting so he’s looking right at her, “I don’t need a name for it, if you don’t. I’m happy just to wake up beside you, Vanessa. I don’t need anything fancy.”

“I just don’t want to —” she stabs, and pauses to collect herself. “I don’t want you to be unhappy. If you desire something beyond my — limitations, don’t you dare settle for my strange set of terms.”

“Vanessa,” he says firmly, taking both of her hands. “You know the most peace I’ve ever felt? It was on the moors with you. Making supper together. Planting the garden. Taking care of the house. Teaching each other. Every night I thought,  _ I’d never want for anything if the rest of my life could be just like this _ . Breakfast together. Separate beds, if you wanted them. Waiting for you to come home. I didn’t think I’d ever have anything so sweet, and with you, I  _ did _ . Is that enough reassurance?”

Vanessa stares at him, gaping. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Ethan fidgets in his lap. “That was your place. It didn’t feel right to insert myself, and I didn’t want to presume after we’d —” He clears his throat. “Besides, when I’ve left a place before, it’s always been alone.”

She opens her mouth, but he goes on, dogged: “I haven’t had many friends, you know that. It was easy to mistake our friendship for something — else. But the moment I kissed you that night, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted with you.” He swallows, brushing his hair back from his face. “I know you, Vanessa. I know that I’m happiest with you, exactly as we are, and I know what I want.”

For a moment, Vanessa can’t speak. It’s more than she’s ever let her wretched heart hope for.

“I know what I want,” she echoes, her voice less jagged now. “But you’re the first person to make me think it might be possible.”

He crushes her to him, big hands bracing her shoulders and head. He’s grown so soft that she could just sink into him, let him cushion her from the world.

She sits back, and for a moment she just drinks in the sweetness of his face, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the gold standard of his smile. 

“Darling,” she says quietly, and his eyelids flutter shut. It feels so different, she marvels, to give the endearment, rather than receive it. 

“Is that all right?” she asks curiously, and he grins down at her, wide and indulgent.

“That’s very nice, Miss Ives.”

Emboldened, she leans in toward him, scooping one hand behind his head and tousling his hair with the other. She kisses his cheek, so close that their noses nearly touch. “ _ Darling _ ,” she says again, but she’s teasing now, laughing and bumping her forehead against his. 

“Oh, you’re gonna be wicked with that, aren’t you?” he asks, wrapping his arms around her. “Come here.”

Vanessa drapes herself half-on top of him, lighting on the wide seat of his thighs, trailing her fingers over the swell of his stomach. Her chest is open, soaring, and she presses herself close to Ethan, his heartbeat against her shoulder. The warm rosemary kitchen smell of him, she realizes, is much more appealing now than it was a while ago. “Is there any more soup?” she murmurs, punctuating the request with a small kiss on the soft line of his jaw. “I think I’ve regained a bit of my appetite.”

When he exhales, she feels it in her own chest, the powerful relief in it. He looks overjoyed to be asked, and she  _ loves  _ him, she thinks, she loves him like the steady boil of soup made for someone else with your own two hands, like being woken in the night and glad for it, so you could be aware, for one extra moment, of the person beside you.

“’Course there is,” he says, kissing her forehead. “You stay right here, Miss Ives, I’ll get you some.”

He returns with soup and fresh bread for them both, and Vanessa, her head clear for the first time all day, is struck by how tender the image is: Ethan working with his hands in the kitchen, kneading dough and chopping vegetables, piecing recipes together. She likes watching him cook normally, finding it pleasantly incongruous with the man she expected him to be when they met, but there’s something specifically comforting about it today, when she spent so much of the day chewing on her problems rather than anything nutritious. He likes caring for her too, she realizes, in a way that seems it should have been obvious. When Ethan had sworn to be her protector, months ago now, in what feels like another lifetime, she had assumed that his care would be limited to the realm of vampires and witches — never that it would extend to running her baths, washing her hair, cooking her soup on days when it feels like trying to eat anything else is a Herculean task. Perhaps care is just protection broken into bite-sized pieces, the difference between a fireplace and a blaze. 

_ Protector _ , Vanessa muses, is a title she feels far better suited to than  _ wife _ . 

“It will be something of a challenge,” she remarks as they eat, “to keep you fed like we’ve been doing, out on the moors.”

He angles a waggish look in her direction as he chews. “Thought you liked a challenge, Miss Ives.”

“Oh, I love one,” she replies, raising an eyebrow playfully. “And I think this one will prove particularly rewarding.” She lays a hand on his belly and kneads at it gently, and Ethan stifles a belch behind his hand. “I’ll have to improve my hunting.”

“We could go together,” he offers, setting his empty bowl and plate on the end table. “If you don’t mind doing your hunting in the dead of night a few nights a month.”

“Plenty of animals hunt better by moonlight, Mr. Chandler,” she tells him, sipping the last of her soup. She catches his eye, and when his eyes crinkle as he smiles, she draws in a breath that holds all the power in her, all their potential for a future. “I look forward to becoming one of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "i want to know your plans," say anything


	18. the star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "lover of the light," mumford and sons

It’s difficult not to go right away, once the seed of the idea is planted. But Sir Malcolm and Sembene aren’t due back for another month or so, according to the letters Vanessa has received, and she’s set on remaining at Grandage Place until their return. 

She offers to ask Victor, when they join him for a farewell tea, to keep an eye on the house for the remaining time if Ethan would prefer to leave sooner, but he gently talks her out of it, asserting that it’ll give them time to pack, and form a strategy for shifting on the moors, and just — enjoy their last days of luxury. Vanessa takes it as a challenge to fill him with the best food in London before they depart, and he spends whole days on the sofa in the parlor, his appetite several helpings beyond sated, his head in her lap while Vanessa teaches him about the flora and the fauna of the moors to refresh her memory. 

(“You look … well,” says Frankenstein, looking him up and down with a clinical eye. “Certainly more substantial than when I saw you last.”

Ethan doesn’t blink, just shifts his weight in his seat and lays a hand on his stomach. “Can’t say I don’t recommend it,” he replies, “Miss Ives is keeping me in good food and better company,” and he isn’t sure whether who looks more mortified, Vanessa or the doctor.)

Although Ethan likes the city well enough, the idea of leaving it unspools something feral inside him, and with each walk he takes through the hubbub of downtown London, he grows more and more nostalgic for the wilderness, for endless plains of land, for the clean smell of earth without the taint of smoke and machinery and people, for the sound that Vanessa calls _quiet_ and Ethan knows to be a symphony of tiny wild other sounds that comfort him in their own way. It excites a part of him he’s spent too long tamping down, and he finds himself looking forward to his first full moon on the moors, the unbridled freedom to run and hunt and explore somewhere richer than the elegant, elaborate tomb of Grandage Place. For a minute, he’d gotten very serious about learning to keep a calendar solely by the sun and moon, until Vanessa pointed out that there was nothing stopping them from bringing a printed calendar with them. 

Today, they’re lazing in bed, Ethan attempting to French-braid her hair and Vanessa sightlessly directing, when he notices a trace of metal in the air and remarks, “Miss Ives, you’re gonna bleed any minute now,” and she leaps up, yanking her hair out of his hands.

“Can you _tell_ ?” she asks, and he has to laugh at how _aghast_ she looks.

“Sure.” He reels her back in and drops a kiss on her forehead, aiming for the twin freckles above her right brow. “Heightened sense of smell. It’s very common in dogs.”

She fixes him with a stony look that says she isn’t amused even as her expression is crumbling into a laugh, then turns to rummage through her dresser for a rag. “It was easier when I didn’t,” she grumbles.

Ethan squints at her. “Was it?” he asks. “ _Was_ it? Because I seem to recall someone telling me pretty recently that what I thought was the easy thing was in fact the _harmful_ thing.”

Vanessa turns back to him, rolling her eyes. “Possession is very different. It wasn’t a _choice_.”

“All right,” says Ethan, hauling himself off the bed and wrapping his arms around her small waist from behind. She’s wearing one of his thick sweaters over her dress, cinched with a belt, and he loves how huge it is on her, how it highlights the disparity in size between them. “You’d rather have a demon in you than shed a little blood?”

She sniffs. “Of course not. But it is — _inconvenient_.”

He loves how it sounds in the tenor of her voice, how she pronounces every letter, _in-con-vEEEEnIent_ , like the turn of a waltz. “I could tell you,” he says, swaying her gently back and forth. “Keep track for you once we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I’m real friendly with the calendar, now. I could tell even just by the sun.”

She snaps the rag gently against his chest, then braces her hands on his thick hips. “Oh, stop that,” she says, laughing, and he gathers her into his arms. 

“Do you get hungry when it’s your time?” he asks, scooping her over his shoulder. “I do.”

“The full moon?” she asks, swatting at his generous backside. “I’m aware.”

“No, your time.” He tosses her gently onto the bed and throws himself down beside her. “Same way you get all moody right before the full moon.” 

“I do not!” she says, swatting at him again. Her hair is disheveled in its half-braid, and he loves the way its strands scraggle around her face, the way her pale eyes peer out from under all that dark. _God_ , he loves her like a summer storm, like thunder that never quite leaves his head. 

Ethan lays back, cradling his hands behind his head. “You do! You get all short and take walks alone and it’s very hard for my _separation anxiety_ ” — she angles a mock-withering look at him — “but I’d never dream of asking you to stop. Like it or not, Miss Ives, we’re in this together.”

“Would you change it?” she asks, rolling half on top of him, and he pulls himself up slightly, his stomach squishing into rolls beneath his undershirt, to kiss her forehead.

“Not for the world.”


	19. the moon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "hunger," florence + the machine
> 
> cw: alcohol use (more than a passing mention) through this chapter.

“I can,” says Ethan, leaning forward confidently. He’s got that daring little glint in his eye, up for a challenge, and he regards her with a bright, cocksure grin. 

“You can’t,” says Vanessa, her voice on the edge of a laugh. It’s raining outside, and they’re cozied up in the parlor, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. A cannabis cigarette wafts smoke lazily from the ashtray on the end table, spent and smoldering. 

Ethan rests his elbows on his knees. “Sure I can. Especially now?” He pats his belly, soft and mounded beneath the high waistband of his trousers. “I’m in the best shape of my life to do this now.”

Vanessa sits forward too, exhilarated. “The whole thing,” she says, like a dare.

“The whole thing,” he confirms. 

The whiskey is surely a willing accomplice, but the idea of him eating an entire cake by himself makes her giddy — especially a cake that _she_ made. “All right,” she says, taking the bottle from him and downing a quick slug. “You’re on, Mr. Chandler. Shall I fetch it for you?”

“Nah, I’ll get it,” he says, hauling himself up. “You want coffee, while I’m up?”

She nods. “Please. There’s fresh milk, as well.”

Although supper is a few hours past, Ethan has been making noises about this cake since they settled down to share the whiskey and a few games of cards. They spent the morning making lists of things to take with them when they leave, starting the terrible preliminary process of packing all of their belongings into boxes, and in the afternoon, when the rain showed no signs of clearing up so that they might go for a walk, Vanessa decided she’d finally try her hand at baking before they leave the comfort of Grandage Place’s well-stocked kitchen. She’s pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out — it’s a spice cake, thick and rich with ginger and cloves, and the simple icing she put together from her recipe book complements it well. She’d made it with the intention of putting it toward their breakfasts for the next few days, but she’ll gladly make do with eggs and toast in order to watch this unfold. Given how heavy it was to lift out of the oven, she’s very interested to see how long Ethan lasts.

It’s been a long day, and she’s tired and edging toward tipsy, but her whole being is alight at the prospect of this challenge. There’s something intoxicating about his enthusiasm to eat something she baked herself, but the thing that thrills her most isn’t the thought of watching him _try_ to consume the entire cake, but the possibility that he actually _might_ . And even if he fails, she’s terribly partial to the soft, helpless sounds he makes when he’s overfull, and it’s a whole separate thrill to know that _that_ is inevitable.

Ethan returns proudly bearing the cake and two coffee cups creatively balanced in his hands, and Vanessa curls up on her side of the sofa, eager. The cake is a little bit crooked, its layers assembled with a clumsy but determined hand, and its icing is thicker in some places and smeared with crumbs in others, but she’s inordinately proud of it, looking at it. She loves that she’s made something he’s excited about, and she feels suffused with it: she loves _him_ , warm and familiar like the scent of coffee in the evening. 

Ethan settles the cake plate across his knees, then exhales and looks at Vanessa. “Okay,” he says, mock-serious. “It’s juuust about ten-thirty now. I bet I can do it in … maybe an hour.”

Vanessa considers it. “All right, you’re on. Whiskey?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, taking a long drink. “Ready?”

Heat blooms inside Vanessa, and the ends of her hair lift up with the force of her anticipation. “Ready when you are, Mr. Chandler.”

He makes the bold decision not to cut it into slices, and instead attack it as if it’s intended for personal consumption. “You make a good cake, Miss Ives,” he says around his first mouthful, tipping his head onto her shoulder in exaggerated bliss, and she beams, the whiskey warming her from the inside out.

“It’s one of my powers,” she whispers confidentially, and he laughs. She watches the movement of his jaw, his throat, as he eats, his square hands around the silverware, and when she takes a sip of her coffee, the heat moves through her like magic, fortifying her. 

He offers her a bite off the end of his fork. "Try it," he says. "You made it, you should at least have a bite."

She smiles and takes it. The cake is moist and warm with molasses, a sharp bite of ginger chasing the sweetness. "Oh, that _is_ lovely," she says, a little surprised, and he grins at her, sitting back.

"I told you," he says, taking another bite for himself. "You let me know if you want any more, but I'm more than happy to keep it all for myself."

"Keep it," she agrees, patting the mound of his belly. "I want you to enjoy it."

He makes a dent in the cake that Vanessa assumes to be perhaps two sizable slices, and chases it with another swig of whiskey, belching on his exhale. He excuses himself, his full cheeks flushing, and Vanessa balls a handful of her skirt in her palm to ground herself. 

“You don’t need to apologize,” she says, surprising herself and blaming the whiskey. 

Ethan looks skeptical. “You sure?”

“It’s endearing,” she says, reaching over to pat the soft pile of his stomach. “I don’t mind.”

“ _Endearing_ ,” he repeats, raising an eyebrow. 

“Perhaps I like you a bit helpless,” she says, smiling, and he makes a soft noise like all the air has gone out of him. “I quite like all your little sounds. They’re very sweet.”

He shakes his head weakly. “If you say so, Miss Ives.”

He digs his fork back into the cake, and she leans toward him, the whiskey and cedar wafting off him like how she imagines the West must smell, sharp and earthy. 

“I hope you do like me helpless,” he teases around a mouthful. Vanessa thinks she should probably find it ill-mannered, but against her will, she likes how he sounds — and looks — with his mouth full. “There’s no way I’m gonna be able to move after all of this.”

“No matter,” says Vanessa, brushing his lips with the tip of her finger. Ethan swallows hard. “I’ll take care of you.”

He gulps down another bite, then another, not _quite_ as ravenously as he eats after a shift, but with an urgency that makes her hair stand on end. “Good boy,” she says softly, the words balancing on the thin edge of sobriety she has left. He inhales sharply, then catches a hiccup in his fist. He’s so soft like this, not just in body but in the whole picture of him, filling himself up for her, his noises and desires so gentle, so animal. 

She pinches a handful of his side, and he makes a muffled sound around his mouthful of cake, close enough to a soft, inquisitive _woof_ that she laughs. “Just enjoying you,” she says when he makes a face at her, and he swipes a little icing onto his thumb and holds it to her lips.

“What, am I _your_ dessert?”

Vanessa likes the idea immensely. “So sweet I could have you for breakfast,” she teases, taking the icing. She tucks his hair behind his ear and kisses his cheek, her hand sliding down to spread over the expanse of his belly, full of venison and potatoes from dinner. Ethan cooked, and he’d seasoned everything heavily. Months ago, Vanessa might have pushed most of hers his way, but she finds she’s not just growing used to it, but beginning to enjoy it. 

He takes another slug of whiskey and passes it to her so she can do the same. She lowers the bottle just as he belches against the back of his hand, and a strangled little yelp slips out of her. He turns to her, grinning.

“Oh, you _do_ like that, huh?” he asks, and she burrows against him indignantly. 

“You took me by surprise, that was all.”

He pauses, kneading at his belly, and belches again, louder. Vanessa closes her eyes, her hands splaying in her lap, and Ethan’s fork rattles against the plate. 

“Whoa, whoa, okay,” he says, steadying it. “Easy there, Miss Ives. We’re not even halfway through yet.”

She takes a deep breath, centers herself. She’s finding, lately, that if she lets a little of her energy out at a time, when she’s overwhelmed or excited, it settles less in her chest the rest of the time. It doesn’t scratch the itch of wanting to _use_ it — because it _is_ useless like this, not much good for anything beyond trifling with the lights or rattling the china — but it takes the edge off, a snack to hold off a full meal. 

He fills his mouth again, and when he exhales after he swallows, she can hear the slight groan in it. “Are you all right?” she asks softly, and he nods.

They pass the whiskey back and forth again, and Vanessa feels her mouth getting a little looser, her smiles growing wider and sillier. Ethan’s are, too, his words slower and starting to stumble. She can’t imagine giving up control like this with any other man, trusting anyone else with herself this way like she trusts him. But when she rests her head on his shoulder, her mouth slipping into a soft, easy grin, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

Ethan hiccups, his shoulder jostling her jaw, and he reaches up to touch her face gently. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “Didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She kisses his hand when it brushes her lips. “You could never hurt me, but I’ll sit more carefully.”

Ethan pats her cheek a little clumsily, and she straightens up, crossing her legs in front of her and leaning forward. “How is it?” she asks, nestling her chin in her hands, and he swallows, sighs, cuts another bite with the side of his fork before answering.

“’S good cake,” he says, tilting his head in her direction. “Dense. Is that why you picked this recipe?”

She smiles beatifically. “I happen to like spice cake.”

He snorts. “Yeah, and I’m sure feeding it to me never crossed your mind at all.”

Her mouth is too loose to hold her faux-indignation for long. “Perhaps a little,” she concedes, and he grins at her.

“See, I know you.”

It lights up her chest like he’s turned the dial too high on a lamp, the flare hot and bright up her throat. Ethan is the only person who knows about this — _proclivity_ — of hers, and it makes her fond beyond words, the way he learned this about her and embraced it. That he took the time to learn how she wanted to engage with it, and learn how _he_ wanted to engage in it with her. That’s exactly it, she thinks. He _knows_ her, all of her quiet secret things and all of the loud strange things she can’t hide and doesn’t choose to, and the smile on his face when he sees her in the hall every morning still burns brighter than anything. Not _despite_ , she thinks. _Because_.

She takes another sip from the whiskey and passes it. Ethan gulps the last half-inch and picks up the fork again, but Vanessa, feeling bold, covers his hand with her own. “Let me help,” she says, and he grins gamely, angling himself toward her.

“You’re on, Miss Ives.”

She takes the plate and carves out a large bite of cake, taking a strange kind of pleasure in watching him fit it all into his mouth, his cheeks puffing out as he eats. She has another bite ready when he swallows, and he takes it eagerly. Between mouthfuls, Vanessa thumbs at the soft, gentle line of his jaw, his stubble making it look slightly more defined than it is. She loves how sweet his face looks with its extra roundness, how much less haggard and how much more joyful he looks. 

Ethan reaches for the fork back after a few sizable bites, and she looks at him, questioning. “Oh, I’m gonna keep going,” he reassures her. “But maybe you can —” He tugs her hand to his stomach. “I’m starting to feel a little heavy.”

“Oh, you’ve been more than a little heavy for a while,” she teases, jostling his stomach gently. “Tell me if I’m being too rough with you.”

He huffs a little laugh, and she amends, “And tell me if I’m being too gentle, but I know you’re very full.”

“And getting fuller,” he says, in a low voice that makes her blush. She busies herself rubbing his stomach, adding pressure until Ethan groans and says, “Okay, okay, too hard, no,” the words tight and strained, and she eases off and grasps his wrist in her hand instead as he catches his breath.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, thumbing at the soft spot where his hand meets his forearm. “Are you all right?”

He nods, swallows. “’M fine,” he says. “Just got a little queasy for a second there.” He covers his stomach with one hand, belches once, twice. “All right, that’s better.” 

She passes him his cup of coffee, lukewarm now. “To settle your stomach,” she says, giving it an apologetic pat. “Do you want to stop?”

“Nah,” he says, covering her hand with his as he sips. “Just need a breather. How’m I doing?”

She smooths his hair away from his face. There’s a little color starting high in his cheeks, and she can smell the cloves and whiskey on his breath when he exhales. “You’re doing perfectly,” she says, combing through his hair with her fingers. With her other hand, she jiggles his stomach gently, weighing its doughy softness in her hands. “You’ve gotten so plump,” she murmurs, her voice low with interest. “And it’s so lovely to see you enjoying something I made. You look very — _cute_ with your mouth full, do you know that?”

He grins at her sideways. “Now, Miss Ives, do you mean your cute or my cute?”

“Decidedly yours,” she tells him, rising up on her knees to kiss the top of his head. “Are you ready for a little more?”

He nods, shifting toward her. “Just be gentle with me, hmm?” he says, but he’s smiling.

“Of course.” 

She kisses Ethan’s cheek and murmurs soft encouragements into his ear as he settles back in with the cake, her lips just brushing his skin, and he moans, turning his face away from her to belch. When about three quarters of the cake is gone, he slumps back on the sofa, a soft whine escaping from his throat, and Vanessa presses herself closer, petting his hair with one hand and caressing his stomach with the other. “Shhh,” she soothes, kissing his temple. “You’re doing so well. Look how much you’ve eaten already. Do you feel all right?”

He nods, eyes closed. “Yeah. Just need a minute to catch my breath.”

“You’re doing such a good job,” she soothes, rubbing circles over his stomach. “It must be difficult, you must be so full. But you’re doing very well.” 

His forehead is slightly damp when she brushes his hair from his face, his cheeks flushed, and she pulls her hands away as he sits up straighter and starts to squirm. He sets the plate onto the sofa between them and wriggles out of his sweater, leaving just his undershirt and the undone waist of his trousers. Vanessa catches her breath, tilting her head at him questioningly.

“They were too tight after supper,” he says sheepishly, balancing the plate on his knees again. 

She lays her palm across his stomach. It’s hard and bloated, and she imagines how heavy he must feel, with all of that supper and now the better part of a cake weighing him down. “Hardly a surprise, considering how much you ate.”

He belches again, a low, unsteady sound that sinks claws into Vanessa, and nudges her with his shoulder. “Lord help my waistline,” he says up to the ceiling, with a sheepish little grin, and Vanessa pokes at his belly softly. She pulls his discarded sweater into her lap, too warm from the whiskey to wear it herself but wanting the material comfort of feeling something of his around her. 

“You look so much healthier this way,” she tells him, playing with the cuff of the sweater while he gets comfortable in the corner of the sofa. “So well-fed. No more gaunt cheeks. No more ribs or those sharp shoulders.”

He grins, squinting at her playfully. “You saying that even my shoulders are getting chubby?”

“Oh, just a little bit,” she ribs, pinching his shoulder between her fingers. “You’ve filled out enough that everything is a bit soft. It’s very pleasant. I don’t need to worry about your elbows skewering me in the night anymore.”

She grins so he’ll know she’s joking, and he loops an arm around her and herds her closer on the sofa. “You could do with a little bit of that too, you know,” he says, kissing the side of her head. “I need all this padding to protect me from your knees.”

“You can wrap me in blankets,” she offers, laughing, and despite his swollen stomach he bundles her into his arms and clumsily pulls her into his lap, kissing her cheek.

“God knows you’re cold enough,” he says, bumping his nose against the side of her face. He sighs, a long, ragged sound, and pulls Vanessa’s hand back to his belly. “ _Oof_. You wanna feed me the rest? I don’t wanna let go of you.”

“Oh, _yes_ ,” says Vanessa, and she pulls the plate off the end table. She fills his mouth with cake until he’s so stuffed that he can barely keep his eyes open, their lids drooping as his breathing comes shallow and heavy, like his stomach might burst if he inhales too deeply. He whimpers softly, tipping his head over the back of the sofa, and rolls his hips, pushing his stomach into her hand. 

She runs her fingertip around the plate, collecting the last bits of icing, and brings it to his lips. “Just a bit more,” she whispers, and he sucks the icing off her finger with a soft moan that undoes every part of her he hasn’t yet undone. “Yes, there you go,” she says, keeping her voice soft. “Oh, look at you, darling. You did so well, look at you. Oh, you look so sweet.”

She loses track of what she’s saying as she plays with his hair and rubs at his belly, the whole thing is so overwhelming. There’s something thrilling about seeing a man as large and strong as Ethan so completely laid out by something as mundane as his appetite. The softness of his closed eyelids, his hips pushed out to accommodate the bloat of his stomach, the shallow movement of his torso as he takes short, measured breaths, jagged around the edges. He looks so tender, so vulnerable, and she’s filled with a profound, furious affection for him, tucked in his lap as she massages his stomach and strokes his hair.

“Darling,” she whispers, to see if he’s dozing, and Ethan’s eyes stay closed, but the corners of his mouth pull up into a dreamy smile.

“How’re you doing, Miss Ives?”

“A bit drunk, to be sure,” she admits, running her hand over the hard crest of his stomach. “But very well, otherwise. How do you feel? Do you need water? Coffee?”

“Do I still have coffee?” he asks, surprised, and she fumbles for his cup. There’s still a bit left, and she brings it to his lips. He sips it with his eyes still shut, swallows, belches gently. “Oof, yeah, I’m full,” he says, palming at his belly. “Gonna have to get you a little stove out on the moors.”

For a moment, her buoyancy dips — not for the moors, but as she remembers that soon, the house she’s called a tentative home for the past few years won’t be her home anymore. She’ll miss this sofa, the way it smells like Ethan’s aftershave most days and holds the shapes they sit in to read in the evenings. She’ll miss the familiar fireplace-old wood smell of the parlor, the strange little alcove jutting off the side of her bedroom. She knows Grandage Place can never quell the wild itch in her now that she’s found an outlet for it, but — she’ll _miss_ it.

 _You’re being maudlin_ , she tells herself, eyeing the empty whiskey bottle blamefully. She could probably break it if she chose, just by focusing her energy in its direction, but the contemplation passes as quickly as it came on. She can love something and leave it, she thinks, taking her hair out of its pins instead to give her hands something to do. She can always come back — and perhaps, she thinks, it will be like seeing Ethan in the hallway after a night spent in separate beds: a new reunion every morning, each a little fonder than before.

Ethan whines sleepily beneath her, and she ruffles his hair gently. “We should get you upstairs,” she says. “You’ll hurt your back sleeping that way.”

He mumbles something that communicates, even incomprehensibly, his resistance to the idea. “No, come along,” she says, grabbing his wrists and sliding off his lap. “I’ll help you. We’ll go slowly.”

They haul him off the sofa after a couple of tries, and he leans heavily on her as they take the stairs one at a time. His breathing is thick and slow against her, his stomach making taxed, liquid sounds when he moves too much or too quickly. Twice, he pauses to brace himself on the banister and belch, too full and drowsy to even try to bring a hand to his mouth to stifle it. Vanessa rubs comfortingly at his sides as they go, and he makes a sound so soft and grateful that it’s almost enough to make _her_ brace herself on the banister.

She changes into her nightgown and busies herself with her hair as he changes into his sleep clothes, her hands tightening around the brush with every little sound he makes as he moves around — soft hiccups, the occasional belch chased by a moan, and once he mutters _aw, fuck_ with such a gentle, emphatic tenderness that she turns around to see what’s stymying him.

He meets her eyes, a little sheepish. “Think I’ll sleep with them open,” he says, nodding down to his undone pants, and she laughs. 

“Your stomach will thank you for that, I’m sure.”

He _hmmphs_ and eases into bed, propping himself on one elbow, gently massaging his stomach with his other hand. “Miss Ives?” he mumbles, and she puts down her brush and looks back at him.

“Yes?”

“I really liked that,” he says, giving her a soft, sleepy grin. “It gave it a little extra something, letting you feed me something you made.”

“It did, didn’t it!” she exclaims, and his grin widens at her enthusiasm. “I look forward to making much more for you.” She crawls into bed beside him and kisses his cheek. “You were very, very good tonight.”

“Hmm, that good?” he teases, settling onto his back. She arranges herself against him, her chin on the soft spot between his shoulder and chest. “Next time I’ll have to try to be very, very, very good.”

“Go to sleep,” she whispers, smiling. “I’ll rub your stomach until you doze off.”

“Sorry in advance for the hiccups,” he whispers back, and she muffles her laugh against his chest.

She wakes up not much later, according to the clock, with Ethan curled around her so completely that she can barely move. He sleeps so much more deeply than she does. He’s snoring next to her — well, on top of her, truly — and he looks so sweet, so peaceful, that she can hardly mind being woken so soon after she fell asleep. She listens to his breathing, the way it hitches when he dreams. She wonders if he dreams as man or wolf, or just as Ethan. 

She tucks herself closer against his big frame, His hips and backside are so much thicker than they were, his whole being softer, more at ease. It doesn’t engender any more desire in her than his body ever has, but there’s something tremendously comforting about the way his figure manages to be both strong and plump at once, both protector and protected.

The rain drums on outside. Ethan twitches in his sleep. This never felt possible — to sleep dreamlessly, to be held, to enjoy closeness so much. As much as it settles her to think about moving out to the moors, their whole life has taken root here, growing up and around this house like ivy — choking it, she concedes. They need a larger bed, a wider space to grow, even if it stings to extricate herself from everything she knows here.

 _We’ll go slowly_ , she thinks, and it comforts her. She gently rolls Ethan onto his other side so she can rub his back and his stomach at once, and when she does dream, it’s so gentle it could almost be a memory.


	20. the sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "wildflower," ruston kelly

More and more often over the past few months, Ethan has caught Vanessa humming to herself as she moves about the house, as she washes up each morning, as she brushes through her hair at night. More recently, especially when she doesn’t realize that he’s within earshot, she sings, and Ethan has never been so grateful for the improved hearing his condition offers him. 

He thinks it’s a bit strange there isn’t already a phonograph in the house, given that Sir Malcolm doesn’t appear to have passed up other luxuries, but he remembers what Vanessa had told him some time back, that her bond with the old man was forged by the trauma they shared. Perhaps neither of them has wanted for music while they’ve been sharing the house. 

But the shop a few doors down from the munitions supplier he likes has a beautiful phonograph in the window. Its horn is sleek black, blossoming up from the neck like a Hadesian flower. It reminds him of something Vanessa might wear. Probably pricey, he thinks, but he lets himself step inside the shop to see what’s what.

“Just browsing,” he says pleasantly to the hovering salesman, slowly circling through as if his sights aren’t set on the model in the window. He examines the cylinders available: a lot of classical, a couple of operas. He looks for _Tristan und Isolde_ , one of the few operas he knows by name, but can’t find it. Instead, he chooses a few classical cylinders at random, unfamiliar with most, and tucks them absently into the crook of his arm before he realizes that his whim has solidified into inevitability. Well, he thinks wryly, meandering back toward the counter, looks like he’s buying a phonograph today.

He’s right. It’s pricey. But as he braces the package against the curve of his hip on his way out of the shop, he’s grinning to himself despite the freezing rain whipping through him. He hails a carriage and tucks himself inside, balancing the package on his thighs. He can feel his stomach jiggling as the carriage judders over the uneven streets, and after a while the bump of the phonograph’s sharp edges grows so uncomfortable against the mound of his belly that he moves the package to the seat beside him.

Vanessa is nowhere to be found when he arrives home, soaked to the bone and beaming. He’s in such a rush to get the thing working that he doesn’t bother to change out of his wet clothes. Instead, he fumbles with the cylinders and needle until, after ten or so minutes of studying the machinery and cursing under his breath, a smooth stream of piano pours out from the blossom of the horn. 

It isn’t long before Vanessa appears at the top of the stairs. “Ethan?” she calls, her voice hesitant, and he steps out of the parlor and motions her in, trying not to give away the gift in his eagerness. “Ethan, you’re soaked,” she says, her eyebrows furrowing, “what —?”

And then her whole face changes as she notices the phonograph, her surprise blooming wild and unguarded. “Where did this come from?” she asks, and he can’t keep a lid on his grin. 

“It caught my eye while I was out,” he says, and her eyes grow wide. “I thought you might like it. I kept hearing you sing, and I thought you might like to have some music in the house.” 

Vanessa ducks her head, wrapping her arms around herself as she inspects the device. “It’s beautiful,” she says softly, tracing the curve of the horn with her fingertips. “Ethan, really … you didn’t have to do this.”

“I didn’t really think about it,” he admits. He can feel himself starting to tremble in the way he’s finally identified not as anxiety, but anticipation. “Do you like it?” he asks, circling her gently. “I wasn’t sure what kind of music you liked, and I don’t know most of them myself, to be fair …”

He trails off, watching her carefully. Vanessa doesn’t seem one to covet material possessions all that much, but she’s gazing at the phonograph like she can’t quite believe it’s real, thumbing at the sturdy oak body and caressing its neck like a swan. “I do,” she says quietly. “Forgive me, Mr. Chandler. It's been a long time since someone gave me such a gift. I’m afraid I’ve rather forgotten what to say.”

“How about this?” says Ethan, fiddling with the needle. “Pick something out, we’ll put it on. You don’t have to say anything.”

She nods and chooses a cylinder, and he extends a hand to her, just the way she taught him. “May I have this dance, Miss Ives?” he asks, in his best impression of an affected English accent, and she laughs, taking his hand.

“You may,” she says, stepping in until the curve of his stomach brushes at the ribbed plane of her bodice, and she meets his eyes.

“You’re soaking wet,” she stage-whispers up at him. “You’ll catch cold, and then you’ll have to spend the next week with your head in my lap while I feed you soup.”

He laughs. “Don’t make that sound so tempting, Miss Ives.” 

She moves the hand on his arm to poke at his stomach. “It’s a full moon next week, you’ll need your strength.”

“One dance,” he promises. “And then I’ll change.”

“All right,” she relents, and she leads them through the steps of the waltz, Ethan content to follow. 

“You’ll need new trousers again soon,” she observes, slipping a slim finger between his soft stomach and the taxed fabric of his waistband. She’s probably right — not only is the waistband growing snug, but the fabric at the tops of his inner thighs is starting to pill. It should probably faze him, but he feels more like himself than he ever has, soft and contented, unafraid of comfort.

“Perhaps you should be watching your weight, Mr. Chandler,” she teases, patting his belly affectionately, and he grins down at her.

“Nah, I’ve got you to watch it for me.”

Her smile back is arch and affectionate. “We’ll have to measure you again,” she continues as they dance. “Look how this clings.” She plucks at the buttons on his vest where they’re just beginning to pull.

He flicks his damp hair out of his face. “Miss Ives, I think if it were up to you, you’d keep me in everything just a size too small.”

She steps away, then back, turning under the arch of their hands. “It won’t be quite so easy to have your things tailored out on the moors,” she teases. “I might just get my wish.”

When she comes back to him, she brings her face close, beaming up at him, and he grins so hard it hurts his cheeks at how incandescently happy she looks. He spins her close to him, her pulse impossible to tell from his own, and presses his forehead to hers.

“I love you,” she whispers, and there are some words, when Vanessa says them, that just sound like spellwork. He holds her close, even though that’s not how the dance goes, and kisses the crown of her head.

“I love you too,” he whispers back, and they cling to each other through the rest of the song, until Vanessa gives his belly a kind little pat and says, “Please remember that you’re still very damp, Mr. Chandler.”

“Aw, fuck!” he yelps, spinning away from her, and her laughter follows him all the way up the stairs.

He peels off his wet clothes, down to his underthings, and pulls on an undershirt and sweater, fresh trousers and socks. God bless these sweaters for being the only thing he hasn’t had to size up in, because he’s loath to part with them — not least because Vanessa is so partial to them. 

He thumps back down the stairs, and even though he thinks he’s given Vanessa adequate warning of his approach, she hasn’t noticed: she’s drifting around the room in time with the music, her arms outstretched, and he pauses outside the parlor so as not to startle her. She looks like light. 

When she catches him watching, she doesn’t start. Instead, she extends a hand, and presses herself close to him when he takes it. 

“Thank you,” she says softly, tucking her head against his chest, and he gathers her into his arms, as close as he can get her.

“That phonograph is gonna look real nice in your little house on the moors,” he murmurs back, and she holds him tighter. 

“ _Our_ little house,” she says, like an incantation.

“Our little house,” repeats Ethan, like a prayer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "this must be the place," kishi bashi


	21. judgment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "two of us on the run," lucius

Ethan goes on ahead, a few days before Vanessa. There’s a full moon coming just as Sir Malcolm and Sembene are due to arrive home, and he says he’d rather not taint their reunion with his shift. Vanessa is quietly proud of him for putting his own comfort before social mores.

But it’s strange, not having him in the house. As she watches Sir Malcolm and Sembene unload trunks from their carriage outside, she wishes for a hand to hold, for the shape of him pressed against her back.

She wrote Sir Malcolm after she and Ethan decided to abscond to the moors, informing him of her decision but letting him know she would wait for his return. There was no letter in reply, but she isn’t sure if he received it or if he simply didn’t see the sense in responding when he might reach her before his letter would.

But the moment she meets his eyes, she knows that he knows. There’s been a sadness to Sir Malcolm for as long as they’ve been in this house together, hostile and familial by turns, but this is different, a resignation. 

“So,” he says that night, as they’ve settled for coffee in the parlor. “You’ll be leaving soon?”

She nods. “I think it will be best for me. I need space to stretch my legs, so to speak. I am grateful for your generosity, and for your company, but I believe the time has come for me to make my own way.”

He nods slowly, the crease between his eyebrows deepening. “And Ethan?”

“He’ll be with me,” she replies, sipping her coffee. “If you’re worried for my protection, I’m sure he’ll do an excellent job.”

He keeps looking back to her hands, and she can’t understand why until he sets his cup down and leans forward. “You must invite us to the ceremony,” he says, “if there’s going to be one …?”

She realizes, so abruptly that she splashes her coffee onto her dress, what he thinks is going on. “We’re not marrying,” she corrects, dabbing at the damp spot. “Ethan will be with me, but not as my husband.”

Sir Malcom’s eyebrows furrow. “You’ll have the child out of wedlock? I respect your decisions, Vanessa, but surely your religion —”

“There isn’t any child!” she yelps, setting her cup down before she spills any more. “Ethan and I care very much for each other, Sir Malcolm, but not in that particular way. We’re simply living as friends. Partners, if you will.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but it settles something inside her, scrubbing away the last of her doubt that she’s moving in the right direction. It feels precariously like it used to, having Sir Malcolm and Sembene around, just the three of them rattling around a house too large even for all of their sadness, but it’s that, strangely, that urges Vanessa forward. It would be very easy to stay here, shuttered into the same groove she’s run in for years. But although Grandage Place has served her well, a roosting place and safe haven for the time she’s spent hamstrung by her supernatural burdens, the life she wants isn’t possible here — or even understood.

A few days later, she hugs him goodbye, his form stiff and brittle in her arms. “We’ll visit for my birthday,” she promises. Though it’s the beginning of June, September still seems tremendously far off, a dot on the horizon before her. “We’ll see each other soon.”

Sembene takes both of her hands into his and wishes her well, and presses a basket of tinned goods into her arms. “Give Mr. Chandler my best,” he says. “I’m sure the moors will serve you well.”

He gives her a knowing look, and she remembers Ethan telling her that Sembene had helped him first figure out what he was. “I’m sure they will,” she says. “He’ll be pleased to hear you’ve returned safely. He’s eager to see you, I know. But the calendar — you understand.”

Sembene nods. “Take care, Miss Vanessa.”

She hugs them both before she goes, and casts a lingering glance behind her as she climbs into her carriage with her trunks, her heartbeat at once strangled and free. 

The closer her carriage draws to the little house on the moors, she feels her chest start to gather itself in snarls and tangles, a bit at first and building the closer she comes. Perhaps she is opening herself to a lifetime of hatred, coming back here. Perhaps there is nothing here for her but persecution and the bitter footprints of memory.

But Ethan is waiting when her carriage rolls to a stop outside the cottage, leaning in the doorway with his arms folded, a broad, beatific smile on his face, and all the tension washes out of Vanessa, those bitter footprints rushed away by the tide. 

“Heard you coming for a while now,” he says, pushing himself off the door frame as she approaches. “That wolf hearing’s got its uses.”

She grins, tucking her face against his chest as he gathers her into his arms. The familiar woody scent of him, underscored by the wet, green peat of the earth and forest, is so homey and hard-missed that, for a moment, she feels herself lift both of them off the ground. 

“Well, I was gonna offer to carry you over the threshold,” says Ethan when they pull away from each other, flushed and smiling. “But it looks like you’ve got that taken care of.”

She buries her face in her hands and relays Sir Malcom’s misunderstanding of the situation, and Ethan’s big, full-bellied laugh makes her laugh, too.

“Also,” he adds, “to my knowledge, carrying a lady over the threshold is a horrifying tradition for newlyweds, and we’re starting a life here as two independent people who happen to be cosmically joined, so I think it’s better if we just walk.”

She grabs his hand, the contact grounding her. “Two people who are cosmically joined,” she amends, “and, I think more importantly, who have chosen each other.”

His eyes go soft, his smile softer. “I think we chose each other long before we knew that, anyway.”

They step over the threshold together, and Vanessa breathes in the cool, fresh air, the faint scent of herbs and firewood threaded through. She reaches up, taps at the hanging chimes and charms until they sing in sweet, uneven harmony. Ethan has spent the week being handy, and the fallen, charred rafters have been replaced with new, bright wood, the beds have been remade with fresh, clean sheets, and the water pump in the corner is polished and gleaming. On the floor, there’s a nest of blankets, tangled with a sweater she thought she had lost, tufts of fur and bits of grass littered around the makeshift bed. Nothing has ever seemed quite so much like home. 

“Welcome home, Vanessa,” says Ethan softly, and she squeezes his hand, smiles as he ducks his head to avoid the chimes.

“Welcome home, Ethan.”

It only takes a few days for her to start feeling herself stretch and move, as if she’d been living in a tight little box until she arrived back here. She’s free to disappear into the woods as she pleases, bury her hands in the dirt of their garden, hunt and gather using her own cleverness. Gradually, she feels her city sensibilities start to fall away, and it’s only a week or so before her corset follows. She can’t remember when it last felt so easy to breathe. 

Although she believes that the cottage is haunted, it isn’t the garden-variety haunting she’s come to know in London, errant poltergeists overturning dishes and filmy children clattering down hallways in nightclothes. She can feel Joan’s spirit in the house, a presence like a hand on a shoulder, comforting and disciplinary in turns. One morning, blearily, she reaches for the salt instead of the sugar to add to her oats, and there’s a shock of cold across her wrist, sharp as a slap, and she pulls her hand back from the canister. Across the room, the charms jangle above the door. 

“You could have said hello,” Vanessa grouses, but her smile betrays the joy that rushes through her. Nothing of the past is ever truly gone, she thinks. It always finds its way back.

They’ve been in the cottage for maybe a week and a half when there’s a knock at the door. 

They’re relaxing after supper, Ethan nearing a second victory on the chessboard between them and Vanessa heckling him to distract from her probable loss, but they both freeze at the sudden sound. She renewed and recast her wards when she arrived, so nothing dangerous should be able to pass as far as the door, but — if this house has taught her to fear anything, it’s other people.

She goes tense, and Ethan half-rises from his chair, craning his neck to get a glimpse out the windows. They look at each other warily, and when there’s a second knock, Vanessa ventures to the door, Ethan behind her, and eases it open.

There’s a girl on the other side, red-eyed and disheveled, and relief cracks over her face like an egg when she sees Vanessa. “Oh, thank God,” she says, a heavy local accent making the words slur and slide. “We’ve been hopin’ and prayin’ you’d come back one day, and I saw the smoke and the lights — thank God, ma’am, we’ve been waitin’.”

Vanessa opens the door wider. She feels as frenetic as this girl looks, hopeful and wary all at once, and as she ushers her inside, she does her best not to let it show. This girl needs a fixed point. Vanessa can be that. 

The girl is looking for a remedy for screaming nightmares, and Vanessa sets quickly to making her a sachet to keep beneath her pillow as Ethan looks on, looking equal parts charming and vaguely ominous as he hangs in the corner with one of Vanessa’s mystery books cursorily open in his lap. Though she’s sure she doesn’t _need_ his protection, when it comes down to it, she feels more secure with him here, if only because villagers might think twice about threatening her if there’s a man with a gun belt hanging around her.

“They still talk about you,” the girl says, her tone hushed as Vanessa nimbly packs her herbs. Her gaze travels nervously between Vanessa and Ethan. “My sister said she saw you in the market the other day, but she’s always tellin’ tales, I didn’t believe her ’til I saw you myself.”

Across the room, Ethan catches her eye meaningfully, lifting his chin in a marginal nod. She nods back, tying off the sachet, and when he gives her a slim smile like a sliver of the moon, she lets herself smile back, unguarded. They _do_ need her here.

The next day, there’s another girl, this one needing something to ease the misery of her menstruation. And then a pair of newlyweds wanting to know whether or not a child is in their future, and an old woman whose joints don’t work, and the girls, and the girls, and the girls. Some have babies; some have ghosts. Others come for remedies they don’t trust the village doctor for; others still have questions they’re loath to ask their mothers. Vanessa herds them inside one and the same, and she does what she can to send them all away with _something_ — a poultice, a procedure, an answer, an appointment. There’s a routine to it she finds intensely comforting, the ability to solve a problem _only_ she can solve. It’s a balm for all that tension she’s kept balled up in her chest, and she feels it dissolving with every person she sends on their way a little more mended than she found them.

Ethan catches her face in his hands one morning, as she’s perched on the stone sill by the window, feeding him wild blueberries she picked on her walk this morning, and he presses a lingering kiss to her forehead. “You look so happy,” he says, and she closes her eyes, lets it rush through her, the June sun warm and sure on her face.

“I don’t know when I last knew peace like this,” she admits. “I wondered what would happen if they had decided they no longer needed me, but — I can’t believe how many of them there still are.”

“How’ve you been feeling?” he asks, squeezing in next to her, and she pops another blueberry into his mouth. “Less tangled up?”

“ _Much_ ,” she agrees. “It feels as if I’m breathing normally again, without some sort of — _gargoyle_ on my sternum.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Probably has something to do with getting rid of that corset,” he jokes, and when she rolls her eyes and smiles at him, he huffs out a laugh and hooks an arm around her shoulders. 

“At any rate, I’m glad to hear it, Miss Ives. I hadn’t realized how much this was a part of you until I saw you in action. I always forget this was your life for a while.”

“Another life,” Vanessa says, and Ethan shrugs with one shoulder.

“Seems like it’s still part of this one.”

So much has happened in the past handful of years that it’s difficult to reconcile as a linear path, and even more difficult to envision as a path that has led her _here_ , remaking a place that left her crushed and devastated into a place for life, for living. Perhaps it was always meant to be like this: one must live through the destruction of the Tower to proceed to the light of the Star.

She opens her eyes. Ethan is gazing over his shoulder and out the window, one hand absently bringing berries to his mouth, watching the warm breeze ruffle the brush. He looks so young like this, the sun bringing up all the gold in his eyes, the gentle flush of his cheeks. She flicks at his hair where it’s just beginning to brush his shoulders, and he grins at her sideways. He takes another couple berries from her bowl and holds them to her lips, and she takes them, smiling.

“I think both of us are going to grow very well here.”

— 

She’s prepared for the stares in the marketplace — she’s fielded them more than her share of them before. They’re intimidating, but Vanessa is not one to be intimidated, and so she makes her way between the stands of fruits and vegetables, flowers and fresh meat and fish, her spine like steel and her eyes even colder.

But her facade cracks when she turns to ask Ethan if he’d prefer beef or mutton for supper and finds him giving the evil eye to someone across the way. His stance is defensive, his jaw set, shoulders tense and high, his teeth bared just enough to threaten, and she tries to follow his gaze before he turns in the other direction.

She examines her produce for bruises and her potatoes for eyes, and Ethan circles her in loose, protective loops, his eyes narrow and intense. “Who are you making faces at?” she asks, linking her arm through his, and he huffs and checks over his shoulder.

“Some people here giving you some real dirty looks, Miss Ives.”

“That’s part of the job, I’m afraid,” she says, plucking a couple of onions from a stand. “The cut-wife is not exactly a beloved position in the community. Besides, I’m sure some of them remember me. I assume they thought I had faded into the ether like a specter.” She tweaks his side. “I’m sure you’re drawing some attention yourself. Not only are you a tall, dashing American, but you’re also on the arm of the village witch.”

She hopes it’ll calm him down, but he growls low in the back of his throat, and she squeezes his arm. “It’s all right,” she says quietly. “I’m rather used to it.”

“Doesn’t mean I’ve gotta like it,” he grouses, but he peels off from her to inquire about work from the grocer at the next stall.

“Not for the likes of you,” snaps the grocer, and Vanessa looks over in time to see Ethan’s head snap up. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he says, his voice rising incrementally, and Vanessa flinches when the grocer spits at him. 

“You’re with the dirty witch, aren’t you? No room for your kind here.”

Ethan doesn’t blink, just wipes his face and steps closer. Vanessa stands frozen, an apple still clutched in her hand, half wondering if she should step in for the sake of her reputation and Ethan’s. The other half of her is deeply interested in seeing Ethan’s temper make its debut among the townsfolk of Ballentree Moor. 

People are starting to pay attention, clustering around the stall, and she ducks her head and steps to the side, keeping a close watch. She waits for Ethan to swing, but instead he gets in the grocer’s face, using his stature and bulk to loom over the man until he’s backed him against the side of the stand.

“You’re damn right I’m with her,” he growls, loud enough for everyone watching to hear. “And I’ll be here as long as she is, so you’d all better get used to it.”

He storms back to her, and she falls into brisk step beside him, keeping pace enough to hook her arm through his. “I don’t know that that was necessary, Mr. Chandler,” she says, though something strange and bright is singing through her at the ferocity of his promise.

“Sure it was,” he says gruffly, though Vanessa thinks he looks rather pleased with himself as he jams his hat back onto his head. “If they wanna bother you, they’re gonna have to go through me first, and I won’t let them get that far.”

He’s quiet for a moment as they walk, and then he adds, “I mean it, though. I’m not leaving unless I leave with you. Unless, you know, you get sick of me and tell me to hit the road, and then I’ll go, but barring that —” He clears his throat. “It’s you and me, Miss Ives. We leave, we leave together.”

Vanessa watches him, the corners of her mouth curling up, and he squints at her. “What’re you smiling at?” he asks, a grin starting across his own face.

She shakes her head. “You’re a good man, Ethan,” she says. “Do you know that?”

He ducks his head a moment, but he looks back at her a second later, his eyes shy and soft.

“Starting to think there might be something to it,” he admits, and she lets her arm slip from his so she can grab his hand instead.

A few days later, she’s on her knees in the garden, a pair of Ethan’s old trousers cinched tightly around her waist, her blouse rippling gently in the warm air. Ethan is filling the watering can he picked up in town and she can hear the creak of the old pump complaining at the back of the house. She smiles, humming to herself as she pats carrot seeds into the dirt. The sun is warm against her back, and ordinarily she might worry about burning her skin, but one of Ethan’s other finds was a floppy straw hat so large it gives shade to even her shoulders.

The sound of footsteps, too light and hesitant to be Ethan’s, startles her, and she looks up to see a girl, maybe sixteen, staring at her, her shoulders hunched beneath her shawl. 

“Hello,” says Vanessa, setting down her trowel, and the girl takes a timid step back.

“Are you the cut-witch, ma’am?” she asks, her eyes huge.

The misnomer only makes her hesitate a moment: it feels so much more natural than _cut-wife_ ever did.

“Yes,” says Vanessa, rising to her feet. “I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "i believe you," visiting wine


	22. the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "someone to stay," the show ponies, & "slow dance," the tallest man on earth
> 
> cw: mentions of/implied physical abuse of a minor character (not by either main character, and not condoned by the text).

It’s Ethan’s first full moon out here with Vanessa in tow, and when he sets off from the house, he carries the anticipation of returning home to her high in his chest. Last month’s moon left him breathless with its liberation, full of vitality rather than dread. The second night, he’d found himself looking _forward_ to the shift to fill his lonely days before Vanessa’s arrival, to the feeling of the grass and dirt beneath his paws, the panoply of scents to explore. It had been strange to be without her, after spending the better part of the last year with her and every day of the past six months or so, and it felt like all of his veins were full of poison oak. 

But for the first time in months, he’d been completely alone, land stretching out around as far as he could see and farther, and it had occurred to him that in another life, he would have run — seized the first chance to cut loose and find the next place to start over.

The moors, he’d decided as he fixed up the house, _are_ the next place. Maybe even the last.

Tonight, he runs so long he thinks he must be halfway to the Channel before he turns around. He sniffs around, splashes in a creek and rolls around on its banks, stops to feed on his way back to the cottage, glutting himself on wildlife to sate the hunger rising in his belly. His consciousness feels different as a wolf, less verbal and less cohesive, more a complex interweaving of sounds and smells and images, but he was delighted to discover last month that he has much more presence of mind when he’s hunting now. Although there are sometimes villagers in the woods at night, he can differentiate between people and prey in a way he never could before. It feels like a strange little point of pride, that now, when he hunts, it’s only what he would hunt as a man. When he wakes in the morning, there’s no uncertainty anymore, no more guilt.

He lopes back to the cottage more slowly after eating, his belly full and his energy waning. The sky is slipping lighter, and the sweet smell of dew rises up from the grass as he trots toward the copse of scrub nearest the house to nap until the waning moonlight fades completely. With Vanessa’s help, he’s squirreled away little packages of clothing here and there, shoved under bushes and inside trees, protected by little charms to prevent their misplacement or discovery, so he can make the most of his nights without worrying about being caught out when he shifts back.

Vanessa is still in bed when he returns a while later, heavy and still half-asleep, and he keeps a hand against the side of his belly as he climbs the stairs to her. He slips into bed beside her, his stomach sloshing with the movement, and kisses the nape of her neck without even knowing if she’s awake to feel it. He’s spent, exhausted, but pleasantly so, every inch of him worn out and satisfied by his exertion. 

Her breathing isn’t quite as even as it is in full sleep, and he wonders if he disturbed her. He settles behind her, his arm resting comfortably over the dip of her waist, and when he hiccups, he feels his stomach move against her spine. She stirs, and when she turns over onto her back, her eyes are flickering open.

“Good hunt?” she asks, her voice near-baritone with sleep, and he grins, noses at her and kisses her cheek.

“Didn’t realize you were up.”

“Barely,” says Vanessa, tucking his hair behind his ear and kissing his nose. “Did you have a good night?”

He nods. She props herself on an elbow and kneads at his swollen stomach, and he belches softly and sighs. “I ran so far, Vanessa. The land just keeps going here. It felt like being home.”

She squints at him through the dark. “Like being in America?”

“No, like — I belong here, in the wilderness.” He turns over onto his side, keeping a hand braced on his stomach, and lets out a soft _oof_. “Ooh, yeah. Gonna need a nap before I attempt the day.”

“Sleep,” she urges, patting the swell of his stomach. “The sun has barely risen, you have time. But — Ethan?”

“Mmm?”

Vanessa’s smile is apologetic. “Do it downstairs, please. I love you very much, but you smell _overwhelmingly_ of wet dog at the moment.”

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, genuinely surprised. “I — Christ, sorry about that. I’ll wash the sheets later.”

“I can take care of it,” she says.“I’ve some rags to wash anyway. Which reminds me — if you’d like to come along on an errand this evening, I need to go into town to be of help with a ghost. I wouldn’t say no to your company.”

He nods, and as he hauls himself up to a sit, he tries to surreptitiously sniff himself to see how bad the dog smell is, but he can’t detect anything. “Sure. What time?”

Vanessa hesitates. “The woman I spoke with said that the spirit is most active between midnight and three in the morning.”

It takes a moment for his drowsy mind to figure out what she means. “Come with you as a wolf,” he says, and she nods.

“A young woman needs protection walking at night, Mr. Chandler,” she says. “And” — a little smile jumps to her lips — “I rather like the idea of the village coming to know us as a pair. The cut-witch and her wolf.”

Ethan pauses. “And if they figure out that the wolf and I are one and the same?”

Vanessa lowers her eyes. “I believe that decision is up to you.”

He hesitates, rolling it over in his head. Anyone in town will be hard-pressed to find quarrel with his wolf form, now that he’s gained such control over it. He’s well past attacking villagers and massacring livestock, and he can hunt well away from their homes and farms if he needs to. And more so, he finds that he _wants_ to test himself, push his limits, learn what he’s capable of. If this is what it means to be her protector, he wants it. 

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “I’ll come. I’m ready.”

Dawn breaks over Vanessa’s face, her eyes soft and her smile softer. “Excellent.”

When he wakes up again, Vanessa is gone, a scribbled note on the table telling him she went out to gather more crowberry leaves ( _with love, Vanessa_ ). He washes up, scrubs the wet-dog smell from himself to the best of his ability, and gets started making coffee for when Vanessa returns home. He puts the phonograph on, hums along as he heats water. The music fills the cottage in a way it could never fill Grandage Place, soaring up to the ceiling, seeping into every cranny of the house.

At first, he thinks the thumping sound is part of the recording, and he carries on until it happens again, out of time. He peers warily out of the window by the door, and sees a girl on the stoop. As he watches, she pounds urgently on the door a third time, and he pulls it open so quickly that she nearly tips over.

“Hi there,” he says, and she takes a giant step back from him. “You looking for Va — the cut-witch?”

She nods quickly. “She’s out right now,” he says hesitantly. “But she’ll be back soon, I assume.”

The girl checks over her shoulder once, twice. “Can I come in?” she asks, in a voice like crumpled paper.

Ethan takes her in: she’s disheveled, her dress torn at the sleeve. A bruise is darkening around one of her eyes, and suddenly her flickering eyes, her anxious glances, her fearful posture, all collide into one terrible thing in his head. He motions her in and shuts the door behind her, and for a moment they just stare at each other. He feels enormous beside her, and he scrambles for what he can do to seem less threatening to her. 

“You need something for that?” he asks, indicating her eye, and she nods, hugging herself. She keeps her distance from him. 

He wets a rag with cold water and wrings it out, passes it to her. “That’s about as good as I’ve got for now,” he says apologetically. “You need water, or anything? Blanket?”

She shakes her head, holding the rag to her eye. Her other eye watches him like a hawk.

“You can sit,” he offers, and she does, perching on the very edge of one of their kitchen chairs. She’s shaking so hard he can hear her teeth clattering against each other. 

He sits as far away as he can, and finally he asks, “Someone do that to you?”

She nods. 

“My intended,” she whispers about three minutes later, and Ethan nods grimly.

“You’re safe here,” he says, though she doesn’t look like she believes it. “I promise. No harm’ll come to you as long as we’re here.” 

It’s maybe an hour that they sit there before the knocking starts. The girl jumps, and Ethan leaps up, grabbing his gun belt off the chair by the door and hitching it around his waist, a fair few notches looser than it used to be. 

There’s a gangly young man outside the door, looking what Ethan approximates to be spitting mad. Ethan’s hackles rise, a growl moving up his throat, and he opens the door with his hand resting lightly on one of the guns at his hip. He uses his bulk to block any view inside, and asks, in a voice with blades barely buried in its pleasantry, “Can I help you, sir?”

“There a girl here?” the man asks, glaring up at Ethan. “’Bout this big? Redheaded?”

“Nope,” says Ethan, in the same shit-eating, law-abiding tone he used to start bar fights with, way back in his life before Vanessa. “You don’t get off this property, there won’t be a scrawny little bastard here, either.”

The man takes a step closer. Ethan takes two. The man takes a step back.

“That’s right,” says Ethan, low, his hand still on his gun. “I’d thank you to take your business with you when you go. I’ll be right here should you come back, so I’d advise you make the wiser choice and stay away.”

The man, crimson with rage but clearly unwilling to punch this far above his weight, finally storms off, and Ethan shuts and locks the door behind him. His eyes go to the girl by the fireplace, and he takes a cautious step toward her. “You okay?” he asks softly, and she nods shakily. 

“I don’t think he’ll come back here,” he says, pulling his chair in front of the door and sitting down heavily, his long legs sprawling in front of him. “But if he does, we’ll figure something out, don’t you worry.”

He gives Vanessa the rundown when she comes back in, his tone hushed. “You got a way to help her?” he asks, and Vanessa gives him a look that tells him she has several, each more deserved than the last. 

Vanessa speaks to the girl, learns where her parents live, and Ethan listens carefully from across the room. When Vanessa crosses back to make a poultice for her eye, Ethan grabs her arm.

“I’ll make sure she gets somewhere safe,” he says. “Run the guy off again if I need to.”

Vanessa nods. “Protector,” she says softly, touching his shoulder as she passes on her way back to the girl, and he watches Vanessa work her magic, thinking the same.

—

Vanessa hums to herself as she readies her herbs, her crucifix, her lantern for the haunting she’s taking care of in town. She isn’t sure if the tune is one of the folk songs Ethan hums around the house sometimes or something off one of the phonograph cylinders, but she can’t get it out of her head. 

When she comes downstairs, laying her cloak over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, Ethan is humming the same thing under his breath as he scrubs at the dishes from supper. She hugs him from behind, resting her chin against his shoulder, interlocking her hands below the curve of his belly. He’s wearing fewer layers the warmer it gets outside, and she loves how plump and ripe he looks in the summer sun, like he’s coming into bloom. 

She kneads the spot on the crest of his stomach that always gets tight after he eats, and he sighs contentedly, then hiccups when she jiggles his soft underbelly. He makes that little _woof_ of exertion that she finds so sweet, and she stands on her toes to kiss the nape of his neck. 

“Almost ready to go?” she asks, giving his stomach a final pat, and he nods, wiping his hands and turning to catch her in his arms. 

“Just about. A little moonlight and I’ll be good as gold.” He flicks his hair out of his face and nips down to kiss her forehead. “You ready?”

“Very nearly,” she says, skimming her hands down his sides. “Let me get my shoes, and you can shift.”

As she climbs the stairs, she hears him start to sing again, a little louder this time, and a smile brims over her face. His companionship, this little house, a bit of night work — who could have thought it possible?

This morning, she cast her tarot outside, a scrap of tarpaulin serving as her altar cloth. The early breeze rifled through her hair, and she’d slicked her loose ends back with a palm’s worth of dew. She’d just finished burying tufts of Ethan’s blown-out winter coat around her garden to ward off the rabbits nibbling her sprouts, and in one of his cotton button-up shirts turned up at the cuffs and the ragged long skirt she’d slept in, she’d felt, possibly, that she was at her most feral, tumbled out on the grass turning over cards in the summer sun. 

The Four of Wands: stability, homecoming, fire reshaped into warmth. The Nine of Cups: bliss, fulfillment, deep contentment with one’s situation.

And the High Priestess, tumbled out on the grass, turning over cards in the summer sun. 

Now, she waits until she hears the click of Ethan’s nails against the stone floors to join him downstairs, and she pulls her cloak around her and gathers her tools as he turns excited circles beside her. 

“Ready?” she asks, and he looks up at her, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his brown eyes bright. She can see Ethan’s keen, soft gaze in them more than ever now, see that this is as much his body as his human form. 

She bends down and plucks a couple more tufts of loose coat off his hips, gathering the loose fur and setting it on the windowsill. There must be a way to turn it into a ward of their own somehow. Ethan makes a low, exasperated sound in his throat, and she scratches his ears apologetically. His head comes nearly to her waist, and he tips it up so she can get the spot beneath his chin. “Good boy,” she murmurs, and he leans against her, swaying her a step to the right. His wolf form has filled out as his human form has, bulky and powerful, agile despite his size.

She opens the door and he bounds out ahead of her, the gray and brindle in his fur glinting in the cool moonlight. He takes a minute to frolic in the grass, burning off his anticipation in wide circles around her, and she laughs, a crisp, jangling sound that echoes through the dark.

Vanessa thrusts the lantern out in front of her. She calls Ethan to her side, and together, they step into the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND THAT'S IT!!! this is the hardest thing i have ever written but i am very, very proud of it. if you made it this far, THANK YOU!!!! I hope you enjoyed it!!
> 
> if you wanna talk about this more, you can come visit me on [tumblr](http://www.alittlepudge-neverhurtnobody.tumblr.com)! i am super late to the penny dreadful fandom and if you are all still out there .... come talk to me!


End file.
